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2005-12-04

Lining Up Open Formats for Office Documents

Toward Open Format Adoption.  The work to develop open office-document formats caught my attention in June, when Microsoft attracted attention to the already-licensed Office 2003 XML Reference Schema licenses and announced that Office “12” would use improved formats as its defaults, with use available under the same licenses.   I didn’t give the OASIS OpenDocument 1.0 announcement any of my attention until then.

Meanwhile, I developed a comparison table that reflected my best understanding of the relative status of the OpenDocument Format (ODF) and Office Open XML (OOX) undertakings.  When Sun Microsystems introduced a covenant not to sue over implementations of ODF, I made my first update.  Microsoft recently followed with their own version of a covenant and I have updated the table once again.

I have also refined my analysis of the ways that the currently-available (and promised future) specifications, schemas, and software implementing the formats (or elements thereof) are impacted by the offered licenses.  I then sketch how that provides room to move forward to adoption and support in ways that are valuable to me.  That’s all provided in my latest on-line analysis.  I am sure that there will be more reason for updates, but perhaps not at such frequent intervals.

Here’s the portion of the latest comparison table that covers the Royalty-Free patent and covenant-not-to-sue provisions:

 

Patent Freedom Approach	OASIS Open Document Format (ODF)		Microsoft Office Open XML (OOX) Format
	with Sun IPR notice of 2002-12-11	with Sun Patent Statement of 2005-09-29	with 2005-11-22 covenant not to sue and future ECMA/ISO Submission	with Microsoft Schema Reference licenses (copyright and patent)
royalty-free patent licensing	Sun Microsystems "essential claims" royalty-free license	Sun Microsystems will not enforce any of its patents, present or future	covenant not to sue applies, with or without following license conditions	Microsoft "necessary claims" royalty-free license
patent-license scope limitation	only where unavoidable in order to implement the specification, and only to implement the specification	any implementation of ODF 1.0 and subsequent versions in which Sun participates to an extent that OASIS rules apply in regard to IPR	under the covenant, those portions of a software product that read and write the format	only where unavoidable in those portions of a software product that read and write files that are fully compliant with the specification of the schemas
patent reciprocity required	Yes.	No.  License is terminated for any party that attempts to assert patent rights against any ODF implementation.	No.  Suing Microsoft or affiliates for infringement of a related patent claim will terminate the license for the complaining party.  The covenant not to sue will also be voided with regard to the suing party.
patent-license notice	none required		license usable but not required under the covenant	specific statement required

posted by orcmid at 12/06/2005 09:53:48 PM, rating data by NewsGator Online