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The Heavy Lifting toward Open Formats in Microsoft Office

Channel 9 – Jean Paoli and Brian Jones: More on Office Open File Formats.  There’s another Channel 9 video on the Microsoft Office Open XML formats.  This time Robert Scoble interviews Jean Paoli and Brian Jones together about the 2-year effort to expand the Office 2003 use of XML to a level of open, full-fidelity XML formats that will be the default formats. 

My attention was drawn to two things:  First, the Microsoft team has a vision of the power that open formats for electronic documents provide as a social good.  Secondly, there is a desire to see the format usable in an unlimited variety of applications, including ones delivered as open-source software.

The open-source case has not been spelled out. I have investigated ways to use the formats and the royalty-free license with open-source software, and I add my preliminary observations here as part of my continuing analysis of the opportunity that I see.

You can view the 24–minute video on the channel 9 page, download it (76.4 MB .wmv file), or stream it to a media player (MMS protocol).

The Vision

+02:55 Scoble asks Jean Paoli what has him be so passionate about XML and what using XML means for the world.  You’ll have to listen to the video to capture Paoli’s accent and enthusiasm (+03:20):

“Since a long time we always dreamed—in the XML community a long time ago, 20 years ago, and when I came to Microsoft [9 years ago] we start to XML and all this was—to basically open up those formats and you know it’s very important because the implications, I believe, are not only technical, they are really at the society level, because then you can access books, you can access writings, you can access poems, all of these things in an open manner, and you can reuse it … It’s a very fundamental change.

“What’s making me very happy is that when we started with Office 2003, it was really the very first kind of XML for the masses.  But now what we are doing is—you know we have 400 million users … and I believe they have billions of documents, we don’t know the numbers—and we are organizing, basically, a massive transfer of these documents to be open in XML format.”

How Can Open-Source Developers Participate?

The Microsoft Office XML Reference Schemas license (the one proposed for the new formats too) does not permit derivative works.  Also, the royalty-free patent license applies only for the portions of programs that read and write files that conform precisely to those schemas.  The reliance on the license must be acknowledged in the software.

That's not the end of the world, but it is perhaps why the wording of the FAQ/Q&A response is a little, uh, indirect when it says 

Q. Can the license from the Office 2003 XML Reference Schemas be used by open source developers?

A. Yes.  Open source developers who wish to participate in a community development project can enter into the agreements and then work in a collaborative fashion on development of a program or programs.

Q. Can I distribute a program that can read and/or write files that support the Office 2003 XML Reference Schemas in source code form?

A. Yes.  You can distribute your program in source code form.  But, note that the patent and copyright provisions in the license for the Office 2003 XML Reference Schemas require you to include a notice of attribution in your program. [Actually, unless you include the schemas themselves, it is only the royalty-free patent license required notice that must be included in code, although the license and their notices effectively refer to each other.  See below. -dh:]

Q. Can I distribute a licensed program under an open source software license?

A. Yes.  There are many open source licenses available in the developer community.  One useful place to review the various licenses that have been approved by the open source community is at Open Source Initiative [OSI].

The terms and conditions of these licenses differ in material respects.  We believe you can distribute your program under many open source software licenses so long as you include the notices described in the licenses for the Office 2003 XML Reference Schemas.  … [followed with good advice about making sure that you wouldn’t be violating conditions of the open-source license and obtaining legal counsel.]

The Schemas are not Open-Source Compatible

Basically, you can not envelop the schemas themselves in an Open-Source Definition compatible license because that would violate the Microsoft license.  You can (and must, I say) segregate the Microsoft material in a way where there is no license confusion, sort of like treating them as redistributables that can only be redistributed under their own licenses but are employed in works that have broader (that is, OSD-compliant) licenses for the added-value parts.

That's not a unique situation. I go into this more elaborately in my analysis of the Copyright part of these licenses in an earlier blog entry.

This is not the only time that commingling is to be avoided.  This should be done even when same-license materials having different authors (that is, copyright holders) are packaged together in some way.  You need to know who the several copyright holders are in case there is a question or desire to negotiate a special license, and if there is a dispute about the authenticity of the material.  As a general practice, I think attribution and clear demarcation of the material should be practiced at all times.

Licensed Software Should Not Be Commingled with Other Open-Source Code

There is an additional requirement because the royalty-free patent license applies not to the Microsoft schemas and specifications, but to software that you or others write.  Pieces of open-sourced code that accomplish reading and writing of the formats in conformance with the schema (isolated in an object of some kind, let us hope), must provide attribution and notice of reliance on the royalty-free license. 

I believe it is important to segregate that code too, because anyone who modifies it must either preserve the license-required conditions or remove the license statement and not use the code to access the Microsoft format. 

I prefer these arrangements because I would not want anyone who used an open-source offering of mine to find themselves in infringement because the license conditions were not preserved in their derivative work.  Also, segregation helps be clear how much of the software is thought to be under cover of the license.

I have a summary of the conditions in a follow-up on my blog.  Notice that exactly the same thing must be done in using the OASIS OpenDocument formats and schemas.  Although Sun Microsystems does not require an acknowledgment of the license, I would make sure to put something in about that to protect downstream developers in the same way, and I would segregate in the same way.

Preserving Licenses Must Be A Clear Condition on Derivative Works

Finally, in providing the notice that Microsoft requires, I would include additional information from the royalty-free patent license to communicate to anyone who inspects the source code exactly what conditions they must accept and honor in order for them to have licensed software.  I would also be careful not to stealth the licensed code at them.

With luck, we're talking about software units that someone would either use intact (apart from fixes and interface adjustments) or would replace completely in making a derivative work of the open-source portions.

I would not risk a dangerous misunderstanding by supposing that code covered by these royalty-free conditional licenses can be enveloped—embraced and extended—under any Open Source Definition compatible licenses, including the GPL, that permit derivative works.  Somehow, preservation of Microsoft’s (or Sun’s or IBM’s) license is a constraint, and that constraint must be preserved in some appropriate way with whatever open-source packaging and licensing that is used. 

Having said that, I am not that clear how I would do it and also explain it to a lawyer that I was asking for review of what I wanted to accomplish. My personal inclination is to adopt a BSD-like license template that allows for enumeration of any patent-license constraints, interoperability conditions, attribution requirements, and non-confusion clauses that may be important to establish.  I wonder how the OSI will find a way to simplify the variety of OSI-recognized licenses while honoring the importance of optional constraints such as these.