Nasty catch with: Royalty free licensing of the Office User Interface?

MS just announced the royalty free licensing of the Office User Interface. At first glance this seems like a very generous offer since it includes much detail on how to what behaviors you must implement (Ribbon resizing anybody?). On one level this is amazing if you don’t compete with MS you can mimic there look and feel with no guess work involved. You will spend many fewer hours playing around with Word trying to decide exactly what happens in each case – they’ve already done most of the work for you.

You can build your product on Windows, Linux, OSx. This is all good. This means that a user will be able to sit down in front of an application that supports the new UI and it will behave the same as Office 2007 would.

John Paczkowski on GMSV thinks this is an entirely good thing, but I think there's a catch.

The license isn’t royalty free if your product competes with: Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, or Access. I appreciate that MS spent a lot of money developing the new UI, but aren’t we back to threat of Look and Feel lawsuits. I thought we’d seen the last of these Lotus? Borland? in the ‘90s.

If I want to write a competing product am I safe if I don’t sign the license agreement and just copy the look and feel? Can you copyright Look and Feel? Patent it?

Who decides what is a competing application? Does MS decide before or after I've written it? Is this decision revisited every time I release a new version of my application?

Is MS is targeting anyone here? OpenOffice? StarOffice? Google Spreadsheet/Writely? Novell Evolution? Corel WordPerfect? Or do you just think I’m inventing a conspiracy theory for the sake of it?

So Jensen what would the terms be if OpenOffice came knocking? How can we be sure that you won't pull the rug out from under our feet by declaring after a couple years of work that our application competes with office?

BTW Marc Orchant makes mention of Jensen's post but misses the big questions.

Thanks to Stuart Laughlin for first mentioning this on the WinTech OffTopic list.

if you enjoyed this post, subscribe now to get free updates.