Office UI Licenses Available

Developers who want to make their applications look like Office 2007 can obtain from Microsoft a free perpetual license to implement the new user interface (UI) in their products. However, the license provides no code of any kind—it is simply a license to various Microsoft patents and other intellectual property rights. Furthermore, developers building products that compete with Office are not eligible.

A Break from the Past

The program provides developers with a license to use Microsoft’s intellectual property (IP) related to the new Office UI. (The new UI is described in “Office 2007 Ships with New User Interface“.) Microsoft is not providing a specific list of patents or other IP that are covered by the license but says they include pending patent applications on “functional innovations,” pending design patent applications on the “original design elements” of the UI, copyright rights to the “creative expression in the visual screen,” and trade dress rights to the overall appearance of the UI (to the extent that users recognize it as coming from Microsoft).