Repeating an announcement it made last month when following Novell and Xandros in signing a patent agreement with Microsoft, Linux vendor Linspire said Monday it was working with the Redmond company in building translators for converting documents between Open XML and ODF.

Linspire and Freespire -- a free version of the Linux distribution that does not include certain functionality and technical support -- will now include bi-directional translators moving forward. This means OpenOffice.org users will be able to open and save in Microsoft's Open XML formats, while Office 2007 users can do the same with OpenDocument.

Open XML is the new default format in Office 2007, and has been certified by European standards body Ecma; ISO certification is currently ongoing. OpenDocument, meanwhile, has already been certified as an ISO standard for electronic documents. Microsoft says it chose to create its own format rather than utilize ODF due to backwards compatibility issues.

1.0 of the translator was released in February, but only provides support for Microsoft Word 2007. Support for Excel and PowerPoint are still in the works, and Linspire says it will contribute to that development effort alongside Novell and Xandros.

""Interoperability with Microsoft Office documents is critical, and Linspire is pleased to join this ongoing effort with Novell and Microsoft to bring document interoperability to our mutual customer base," remarked Linspire CEO Kevin Carmony.

Carmony said last month that it's time for competition between Linux vendors and Microsoft to be over. "I believe we need to understand, as Apple did in 1997, that Linux exists in an ecosystem and must work with and interoperate within that ecosystem. As unpopular as it may appear to some, Linspire is willing to take a lead in this effort," he wrote in an open letter to the Linspire community.

Microsoft seems to agree with that point, although the company usually reiterates a standard quote on the subject of interoperability.

“We believe in delivering interoperability by design; in this case, by working with partners and members of the open source community we have achieved that goal," Tom Robertson, general manager for Interoperability and Standards at Microsoft, said last month.

"We believe in delivering interoperability by design for the benefit of our customers. Our ongoing collaborative relationships with commercial open source companies like Linspire help us achieve that goal," Jean Paoli, general manager for Interoperability and XML Architecture at Microsoft, added Tuesday.

As part of its agreement with Microsoft, Linspire will also be licensing Windows Media audio and video codecs, along with some of its TrueType fonts (which may be critical in establishing similarity of appearance across document formats), and will choose Windows Live Search as its default online search engine for its pre-installed software.

Not everyone is jumping on Microsoft's bandwagon, however; Mandriva, Ubuntu parent company Canonical and Red Hat have all refused to sign agreements with the company, claiming that Microsoft is simply using the guise of interoperability to forge patent agreements that infer Linux is infringing on the intellectual property of others.

"Allegations of 'infringement of unspecified patents' carry no weight whatsoever," Canonical CEO Mark Shuttleworth wrote last month. "We don't think they have any legal merit, and they are no incentive for us to work with Microsoft on any of the wonderful things we could do together."