I love the RibbonBar in Office 2007. It has already very obviously made me more productive with Word and Excel. I am playing with the telerik radRibbonBar control (from their new WinForms controls) in an app that I may be the only user of (oh, save me from the dangling preposition). Other vendors already have them as well, such as Infragistics and DevExpress. But as anyone who knows me would be aware of, I am waaaaay too lazy to read a 120 page document of guidelines for how I can legally use the ribbonbar in my apps. I appreciate that Microsoft invested a lot of IP (and time and money) into the RibbonBar, really I do. And I'd like to think that if (like many will surely do) I just signed the agreement and used the thing without reading (and therefore, most likely, without properly following the guidelines) that Microsoft wouldn't choose me to make the example of in court. Bye bye house. Hello trailer park.
It was interesting to me that the first batch of comments in Jensen Harris's blog post about the license (Jensen is on the Office team at Microsoft) people were saying “wow!” “awesome!” and “thanks!”. It took a bit of skimming through 80+ comments before the expected responses showed up. Although I haven't seen anyone admit, like me, that they were just too darned lazy to read and implement the guidelines.
I do worry about the third party vendors. They have to keep a poker face on this and repeat the “heck, it's free and easy to get this license“ mantra since anyone using their RibbonBar controls also has to get the license from Microsoft. It's not “grandfathered“ with the license to the control.
Here are two [1,2] blog posts from one of the third party vendors, DevExpress, on the topic.
I doubt that this will quietly go away.