Blogging Ottinger (tim)More Opendoc News
More news on OpenDoc format today. M$ is getting their proprietary format standardized.
In an FAQ, the company said it will grant royalty-free access to third parties that want to use the file formats and that it will not sue any other party for using patented Office technology.
In answer to a lingering question following the company’s announced plans, Microsoft said its licensing scheme will allow for creation of open source products.
“Because the [open source] GPL is not universally interpreted the same way by everyone, we can’t give anyone a legal opinion about how our language relates to the GPL or other OSS licences, but we believe we have removed the principal objections that people found with our prior licence in a very simple and clear way,” the Microsoft FAQ stated.
Looking at the bright side, I don’t much care what doc format most binary-format editors use, as long as it’s an open standard — meaning that the standard is freely usable by all without fear of patent or copyright or other silly lawsuits. In other words, if a teenaged kid in his basement can acquire the standard for free, and implement it without fear, and without ever paying lawyers’ fees in order to protect himself from fine-induced poverty or jail time.
If it’s free from fear and fees, I’m all for it. I know that some of my DSFG friends will be angry about that, but in this less-than-perfect world, I’m happy to see “good enough.”
This DFSG friend would have no problem if Office XML turned out to be as open as you describe.
Some time back, I would probably have snarked about MS not being terribly good at keeping promises like this. But the situation surrounding Mono gives me cause for cautious, guarded optimism.
Comment by Jeff Licquia — 2005-December-18 @ 04:02