[OpenISO] Fwd: The Deprecated "Smoke Screen" of MS Office Open XML (OOXML)

[Norbert Bollow]

Henrik Sundberg <storangen at gmail.com> wrote:

> > > As I understand it, we are worse off than when reverse engineering the
> > > binary formats.
> >
> > How so?
> 
> Ok. Entering hearsay mode. I read about OOXML patents a long time ago.
> Somehow they had patented the procedures too handle OOXML, not OOXML
> itself. That way they would be able to sue anyone implementing tools
> that reads/generates OOXML files.
> The old binary formats have no patents involved. Those formats are
> never described and oft changed instead. I reckon OOXML is a pending
> patent bomb.

Well, Microsoft has promised RAND-Z licensing of patents for OOXML
that they may have (including any patents that may still be pending).
They have in fact kindly provided me with a copy of the document by
means of which they have made this promise to ISO/IEC.

In my considered opinion (I am not a lawyer, but I have discussed the
legal effect of Microsoft making such a promise with a patent lawyer
who specializes on software patent issues specifically with regard
to their impact on free software), with regard to programs which
implement OOXML only for interoperability purposes (i.e. I'm talking
about the case where the program's internal format and preferred
storage format is a different format which does not fall under the
scope of the patent claims) this reduces the practical effect of 
those patents to just the FUD effect.

The FUD effect is still a serious issue and IMO must still be
considered something that makes OOXML unacceptable as a standard.  In
addition, in order for a data format to be acceptable as a standard,
it should of course be possible to implement it natively in free
software, and not only as an import/export filter for interoperability
purposes.  But IMO no-one in their right mind would consider trying to
implement OOXML natively anyway.  (Certainly MS wouldn't ever dream of
doing that, but they're of course in the privileged position of having
an implementation without having to implement the spec, because
the spec is _documentation_ of the current stage in the evolution of
their program's native document format.)

My conclusion is that the situation is bad, but not that bad that it
would be appropriate to talk about a "pending patent bomb" or that
it wouldn't be worthwhile to continue pushing MS for concessions that
reduce the practical technical interoperability problems of OOXML.

Greetings,
Norbert.


-- 
Norbert Bollow <nb at bollow.ch>                      http://Norbert.ch
President of the Swiss Internet User Group SIUG    http://SIUG.ch
Working on establishing a non-corrupt and
truly /open/ international standards organization  http://OpenISO.org