Welcome to Orcmid's Lair, the playground for family connections, pastimes, and scholarly vocation -- the collected professional and recreational work of Dennis E. Hamilton

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Relaxing Patent Licenses for Open Documents

W050601d: Microsoft's IP-Infringement Specter - Analysis 0.50.  Updated Information: The table, below, has been updated in Analysis 0.75, Toward Open-Format Adoption.  The 2005-12-06 blog post, Lining Up Formats for Office Documents, summarizes the later analysis.  

In June, I made some examination of the move by Microsoft to open up the Microsoft Office document formats as part of moving to XML-based default formats for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.  Other components of the suite also support XML but this full-up default format is for the three key applications in the Office “12” development scenario announced so far.

I had already been studying the relationship between intellectual property (especially patent licenses) and practices that I have in mind for open-source development.  The exploration of the Microsoft Office Open XML formats is instructive in that regard.  My own investigation along with discussions about the licenses on various blogs was valuable in sharpening my own thinking on safe use of differently-licensed intellectual property as part of an open-source contribution.

I’ve completed my personal appraisal of the licensing conditions around Microsoft Office Open XML formats (OX) and the OASIS Open Document Format (ODF).  I have enough to formulate the approach that I will be employing in patterns of TROST and contributions under ActiveODMA.

Also, in June, I posted a comparison of the license and use restrictions that apply between OX and ODF.  That comparison depended, for part of its analysis, on the Sun Microsystems IPR statement on OpenDocument from December, 2002.  Sun made a dramatic improvement with a new Sun Patent Statement that was published on September 29.  I have updated the original comparison to reflect the impact of that as well as further explorations in OX (to the degree publicly known) and the ODF specification.  The changes resulting from the new patent statement are summarized (in my words) in the following extract from the new comparison table.

	OASIS Open Document Format (ODF)		Microsoft Open Office XML (OX) Format
	with Sun IPR notice of 2002-12-11	with Sun Patent Statement of 2005-09-29	with Microsoft Office XML Reference Schemas licenses (patent license impact only)
royalty-free patent licensing	Sun Microsystems "essential claims" royalty-free license	Sun Microsystems will not enforce any of its patents, present or future	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	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.
patent-license notice	none required		specific statement required

The full table provides references to all of the materials as part of an extensive discussion of this and other aspects of the two approaches.

As part of my latest review, I have also noticed some features of OpenDocument that make me wonder how conformance for interchange of documents across products is to be assured. I don’t know how materially OpenDocument’s intentional “looseness” will interfere with successful preservation of public records, for example.  This situation reminds me of the “floor=ceiling” debate that surrounded the specification of the COBOL programming language as part of nailing down the ANSI standards and building conformance tests.  This was a momentous challenge, witnessed by the act of Congress that it took to bring Grace Hopper back to duty for creating the Navy certification process for COBOL compilers. 

If you consult the full table you will see that I have no information on how Microsoft’s Office Open XML format will work in this regard.   Since the standard to be met is consistency of Microsoft Office products with themselves, it is not clear how that will translate to an appropriate public agreement for achievement of interchange and legacy preservation.  It appears that ODF is going to be the incubator for how meaningful interchange and preservation of electronic documents are established.

posted by orcmid at 10/11/2005 11:51:00 AM