Here is the news that Microsoft have launched a licensing program for those who wish to clone the Office 2007 UI (from Jensen Harris' blog). This is a royalty-free scheme whereby anyone wishing to use part of the Office 2007 user interface (e.g. the ribbon) can recreate it in their applications (note that this offering does not provide any code).
There are some restrictions applied however, in particular that the interface must adhere to the supplied UI guidelines. These are very detailed so places quite a burden on the programmer implementing the controls; however this should at least ensure that the end user can confidently use a ribbon-enabled application with the existing knowledge of how the UI should work. Microsoft have done a great job in explaining the requirements - for example they describe exactly how the ribbon should resize - so I'm looking forward to having an accurate check-list of requirements to implement in my controls.
For more information check out the links in Jensen' blog post...
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