I think the relevant portion is a non-compete with MS Office products. further info about license: http://weblogs.asp.net/fbouma/the-evil-of-the-office-ui-ribb...

original license and requirements (now dead): https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/aa973809.aspx

archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20120317065353/http://msdn.micro...

apparently the non-compete is removed now: https://www.devexpress.com/Support/Center/Question/Details/Q...

It's called "ribbon" UI: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ribbon_%28computing%29

And from the bottom of the wiki page:

"The Microsoft Ribbon Licensing Page has been retired, therefore it is no longer possible to license the ribbon control from Microsoft."

There are quite a few vendors like Telerik that would sell your ribbon controls for .NET/WPF/Native/Web applications.

http://demos.telerik.com/aspnet-ajax/ribbonbar/examples/over...

Telerik is quite huge in the .NET world but they also could've licensed it from MSFT for resell.

Going to be picky here and clarify that Microsoft - and the small niche of people who run wikipedia - want people to call it ribbon. But anyone who's used major software from Lotus or KDE knows that tabbed toolbars are tabbed toolbars and Microsoft didn't invent them in 2007.

MS also had tabbed toolbars before they built their ribbon format.

Yea, and that license had restrictions, as mentioned in the complaint.