Microsoft Word Document ML Schemas Published

Lars Munch writes "On Monday the 17th November the xml schemas for the Word Document ML along with documentation, was uploaded to the Infostructurebase (ISB). With the Word Document ML specification anybody can generate, view and process Microsoft word documents on any format." (Here are the legal terms under which the schemas can be used.) "The Word Document ML is based on the W3C specification eXtensible Markup Language (XML), there by providing documents that are easy to integrate into a large variety of systems. The Danish Government Infostructurebase is the first schema repository to make the schemas accessible to the public. The Microsoft Office Document ML schemas and documentation can now be downloaded from the ISB Repository." There are more links on this page.

Comments

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[account_deleted]

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Not true

[nodwick]

You omit the relevant parts of the patent license:

Except as provided below, Microsoft hereby grants you a royalty-free license under Microsoft's Necessary Claims to make, use, sell, offer to sell, import, and otherwise distribute Licensed Implementations solely for the purpose of reading and writing files that comply with the Microsoft specifications for the Office Schemas. [...] If you distribute, license or sell a Licensed Implementation, this license is conditioned upon you requiring that the following notice be prominently displayed in all copies and derivative works of your source code and in copies of the documentation and licenses associated with your Licensed Implementation:

"This product may incorporate intellectual property owned by Microsoft Corporation. The terms and conditions upon which Microsoft is licensing such intellectual property may be found at http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/odcXMLRef/ html/odcXMLRefLegalNotice.asp?frame=true."

You are not licensed to distribute a Licensed Implementation under license terms and conditions that prohibit the terms and conditions of this license.

The license explicitly allows you to sell/offer/distribute an implementation of their standard. The rest appears to be a bunch of legalese saying that you can't transfer your distribution rights to other people; it's not saying that you can't transfer your distribution. Since anyone else who feels like modifying your GPL'd code is allowed to sell/offer/distribute Microsoft's XML standard too under their license, I fail to see why this is hostile to the GPL license. The GPL itself only requires that a patent license be publicly available, not that the rights themselves have to be transfered to the users. Since the Microsoft license lets anyone use implementations royalty-free, it shouldn't be a problem.

The format is not 100% open, there is binary data

[dmelchio]

The format for macros and some other things is not specified (at least not enough to recreate them). The format is still not portable for advanced features. Hopefully Microsoft isn't pushing this as an "open" format, because it isn't really open if it still has blackboxes in it. From the spec:

For VBA code, a base64-encoded version of the binary file generated by the VBA editor is held in the binData element inside the docSuppData element. The binData element has a name attribute whose value must be set to "editdata.mso". The docSuppData element is a top-level element under the wordDocument root element, and follows the styles element in a document created by Word.