Not again.

Intellectual Property Assurance
Through the agreement, Microsoft and Linspire have developed a framework to provide patent covenants for Linspire customers. The patent covenants provide customers with confidence that the Linspire technologies they use come with rights to relevant Microsoft patents. As well, Linspire now joins a growing group of open source software (OSS) distributors collaborating with Microsoft on efforts to establish rich interoperability, deliver IP assurance to customers and build the bridge between open source and proprietary software.

For Microsoft, the agreement is the latest in a series of collaborations with Linux platform and OSS providers. This list of collaborators includes JBoss, LG Electronics, Novell, Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd., Xandros Inc., XenSource Inc. and Zend Technologies Inc.

I now refuse to run Linspire as well. I feel really strong about this – I refuse to let Microsoft have any influence over my Linux system. They have plenty of industry influence already and every deal like this just makes me more livid.

The strangest thing about this deal?

Linspire will select the Live Search service of Windows Live as the Linspire 5.0 default Web search engine, allowing Microsoft to bring Live Search to a broader set of users and providing leading search capabilities to Linspire customers.

Seems a bit ironic they’re setting a search engine which on the UK version can’t find the FSF on a query for ‘free software’ as the default. On what is supposed to be a free software operating system (but arguably isn’t anymore).