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Microsoft Patenting Office XML Formats
mmurphy000 writes "News(.com)+ reports that Microsoft has filed for patents in multiple jurisdictions to control the way other applications use Office's new XML-based file formats. Musings from pundits suggest that OpenOffice.org and other applications might be blocked from interoperating with Office. This, of course on the heels of today's article on Bruce Perens' concerns over patents."
How to make a non-proprietary format (XML) proprietary. Gee, wouldn't it just be simpler to cut XML out of Office entirely than to throw legions of lawyers and patents at it?
I can see the headlines now - "RIAA and Microsoft make double bust - RIAA found illegal MP3s and Microsoft found someone using XML output from Office".
Microsoft - "How far do you want your head up your backside today?"
I knew this was coming. Microsoft sympathizers are always so quick to point out "but look, MS is using XML now so why are you complaining about closed file formats". Now this. Why are we not surprised.
"Backups are for wimps. Real men upload their data to an FTP site and have everyone else mirror it." -- Linus Torvalds
It also destroys what was the entire rationale for XML, doesn't it? What's the point of a convenient medium through which information may be exchanged if everybody starts patenting their DTD's?
Brace yourself for the next version of DOM/SAX/XPath that not only checks to see if the document is well-formed and/or valid, but that also constrains your access to that document based on some new kind of hybrid between DRM and XML Schema.
It's shit like this that makes me want to get out of computers and get into chemistry.
Is this truly the only Earth I can live on?
they make it xml so its open and easy to work with for developers... now they want to try and make it only the developers that pay them $$ ?
Didn't we have this article before ?
ok, so it was last week, but still, jeez.
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
This is exactly the kind of thing the EU Parliament wants the prohibit, via it's amendments to the doming patent EU unification law. The Parliament has clearly excluded the use of patents that hinder software interoperability. Those of you that want to help us in the battle to sustain those amendments (there is a _lot_ of resistance from the big guys) please join at swpat.ffii.org or softwarepatenten.be in Belgium. Patents are indeed more dangerous than SCO.
Which assumes that OOorg is a marginal product. This may be true in some places, for some time, but after a while the failure to interoperate will become a strong argument to switch away from MSOffice.
Typical scene that is not unheard of today:
"I've sent you a Word document"
"Why not install OOorg and use that instead?"
"What's that?"
"It's like Office but free and doesn't crash."
1 hour later...
"Hey, here's your document, and thanks for the tip!"
Point is that it's much easier to switch someone from paying to free software, and almost impossible to do the reverse. I (as a long-time OOorg user) will spend considerably more effort convincing someone to use the application than any MSOffice user will spend to get me to change back.
Ceci n'est pas une signature
... and we still will, regardless of these patents (which I haven't even bothered to read about). It's my fucking data, and I'll do what the fuck I like with it thank you very much.
"Microsoft has always played an interesting game when it comes to standards," he said. "They're going to support them as necessary to get technology broadly adopted. But at the same time, they're an (intellectual property) company. That's the case with any big business."
I would have agreed, if after broadly adopted he would have said "they stop playing according to the standard and thereby break compatibility with other software". If you're an analyst on Microsoft, you should know what embrace and extend is, and I think he should have mentioned it here. That is, unless he's partial to Microsoft, which the company claims it isn't.
is for SCO to claim they own all of the code to the unix interoperability services/functions/whatever for Windows. Then Microsoft goes after SCO for using XML somewhere else. Then they can go after each other in court. Let them destroy each other! Yay! Off-topic or is it? It's 5:20am and I'm still awake, ignore this post, I'm an idiot.
Based on this article even the latest M$Office on the Mac can't read all files from its WinDOS sibling.
Bottom line is, if you want to avoid a lock-in a.k.a. pay to view your own documents if you decide to stop using M$ Software, don't start using the 'new' M$Office in the first place.
my 2 cents
WinFS is the long-promised "replace the user-data parts of the filesystem with an RDBMS" feature, and a key part of Longhorn. It basically lets you register an XML schema for describing your data, and the data is then stored not as XML but broken down into a relational database (see also GnomeFS).
The PDC bloggers and MS internal staff are writing extensively about WinFS - especially Mike Deem.
One of the concerns people have with WinFS is "but then any other program could fiddle around with the individual records of what I store, how do I hide stuff or stop them making my 'files' inconsistent by screwing up or deleting individual records" - and if MS want to patent some aspect of their getting Office ready for this, does it mean we're all supposed to patent our XML before we stick into WinFS ??
I spent a lot of money on booze, birds and fast cars. The rest I just squandered. - George Best
The article wasn't too detailed on what the patent covered but if they do patent it doesn't that mean that they have to release the full spec for their format? And if that happens then other Word alternatives could be created giving people more alternatives.
Also would it be possible for me to "make" a file reader/convert for my own private use?
Except that when it's patented , the details are published......
So, someone makes a change to an existing OSS filter, MS can say, "Hey! You used the details of our patent to further your work, pay up or we'll....(insert crushing legal threat here)"
Which means it's going to be much,much harder to get an OSS filter for the next version(s) of MS Office, as you'll have to be pretty strict with the reverse-engineering to ensure you don't wind up in the courts defending your work against a bunch of attack lawyers from a billion-dollar company.
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
not that anyone for a moment should have suspected these douchebags would.
they're just speeding up the inevitable, making even more clear why software patents suck ass, and why it's urgent for everyone to reject proprietary technologies NOW. RIGHT NOW. the sooner you do it, the sooner the pain will be over, and the sooner you can start reaping the rewards.
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
I think that Microsoft is now in the early stages of SCOitis. Our products suck but we have some questionable IP and we're going to make that our major source of revenue.
Arf!
The bottom line is MS technology should not be used in any way, and we should not belive a bought department of justice will do something about it.
This may sound paranoid but is unfortunatly true. Once you are stuck with MS products they may change the license for new versions as they see fit. If it were not for Linux, Windows would be really expensive today.
Anyone else remember back in the day when all hardware was proprietary? (I don't, it was before I was born, but yeah, I've studied the history books). Think we're headed there with software?? Think the big geeks will ever learn from their mistakes? Open source rocks.
---
Luke
Luke Wertz Website
Ages ago (back when this was a Windows box) I downloaded a little thing for GIMP that let me make GIFs. This was legal because I live in Europe with no software patents as of yet (fingers crossed/touch wood). .doc is: 'you may only use this module if software patents do not apply in your country.' Of course there'd be no way to stop Americans downloading it, which would be just terrible!
OOo could offer something similar if the patented XML format became as popular as the
You cannot generally make an open standard proprietary, what MS is good at is "damage and dillition" of an open standard. The enhancements, bugs, and misfeatures contained in MS implementations of open technolgies tend to become de facto extensions to the standard.
Examples:
- PPP
- HTML
- mpeg4
- SMB
- SIP
- Kerberos
- DNS
- ecmascript
They have varying degrees of success with this tactic, and to be fair most vendors do the same thing - but because of the market pentration that MS enjoys they are more successful at it than most. Proprietary lock in and vendor bashing is bad enough, once patents are added to the mess MS becomes truly evil in this area.[Set Cain on fire and steal his lute.]
September 1, 2003 Eweek 'Longhorn' Rollout Slips
Use proper W3C XML or OOo filetypes...
Didn't OOo do this kind of thing first with their XML filetypes? MS filed this in June 2002 in NZ, so surely OpenOffice.org has precent for a "Word-processing document stored in a single XML file that may be manipulated by applications that understand XML" maybe sans the "single file" part, which would have to be an obvious follow on?
BTW, more info is on the NZ Open Source Software portal.
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
That is why I state that there are different was in which MS extends open standards.
enhancements. If MS offers an easier way to pop open a window in ecmascript and documents it at msdn then lots of people will use it. No one is forcing those developers to use the MS extension, but users of the products of those developers and the developers of implementations that need to interoperate are dragged along for the ride.
bugs. If protocol x has a configuration negotiation sub-protocol and the MS implementation has a bug in its state transitions then all vendors must support work arounds for the MS implementation to avoid being seen as broken themselves.
misfeatures. MS often adds features that are not properly thought out and change the operation of a protocol in such a way as to create some pretty hairy corner cases. Vendors who do not want to be viewed as broken must deal with these cases - even if they do not support the extension themselves.
It is not simply a case of being better than MS, compatibility requirements with MS sneak into all sorts of things - sometimes as a technical requirement, sometimes as a business decision, and sometimes as the payoff to a bit of MS quid pro quo. Often the sheer size of MS removes the choice on whether or not to be compatible with them, especially in consumer software but more and more in enterprise software.
[Set Cain on fire and steal his lute.]
However, I'm a New Zealander, and I'd love to actually try and shoot down this at the NZ patent office based on the wonderful prior art that is OpenOffice.org. However, I saw these two "claims" in the patent:
The rest of the patented method applies to OOo, as OOo provides schemas and writes out a well-formed XML document etc. etc. etc. However, I'm not sure if OOo provides "hints" in the files (anyone care to comment what MS is on about there?).
The kicker is claim [0009]. If you save a
IANAL, but this appears to mean that this patent is "sufficiently original" (haha) that it can probably slip past the rubber-stamp-brigade at the patent office as OOo won't be citeable as prior art. Apparently the NZ patent office is sufficiently stupid that they recognise the "one-click" patent, so I don't hold high hopes for this one.
So, has anyone heard of a word processor that has an XML file format that contains all its binary data? If so, post links under this thread
P.S. And NewtonsLaw, if you're reading this, I hope to see a plan of action on Aardvark tomorrow
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Some may recall, for example, this past article on this topic here, or the specific license terms offered here, the key points of which are specifically GPL incompatible.
When national governments choose to build and distribute information, such as the Danish national government has, on patent license encumbered document formats, whether or not royalty bearing, possessing field of use scope, disclaiming of certain legal rights such as to bring suit, or other specific restrictions, or even composed of terms permitting unlimited modifications to the license by the license holder, as this one also does, such governments are creating restricted markets in the public's own goods. This is of course fundimentally improper and certainly is also illegal restraint of trade in the European Union.
There are many implications in having patent encumbered XML schemas, all of them negative for the schema so encumbered. I had long ago considered this specific possibility and considered what actions I would find nessisary to take when that day arrived. One option I think might be useful is for those in Europe to file a brief with Mario's office (European Competition Minister), and note how this issue relates to their current anti-trust case.
After a bit of searching, i've found activity at IP Australia. The application titled "System and method for supporting non-native XML in native XML of a word-processor document" sounds scary!
I can imagine Microsoft being a victim of it's own success here.
.htz?) that would be great.
If by using DRM/Palladium etc. to prevent both:
- Using ripped off copies of Word
- Interoperability with Word
Suddenly a word document will be vastly less useful in the wild than it is now.
Right now I, my mother, her dog and it's accountant can all read Word docs one way or another but none of us have shelled out for Office, and we probably never will.
I actually love using basic HTML for docs, the only problem is that "a document" is actually a bunch of resources. If there was some encapsulated for (a simple zip even?
(This is where someone calls me a Bozo and tells me it already exists...)
As I underestand it, if MS patents their file formats, that will prevent anyone without a license from generating files in MS Office formats, but it will not prevent people from displaying them or converting the information into other formats. That's because such patents are for methods of "storing" information. I know this seems pedantic, but law is pedantic, and I'm thinking of the precedent of LZW compression. Without a license, you couldn't generate GIF images but you could display them and convert them. So, although I'm distrustful of Microsoft (and don't use their products), and opposed to software patents, perhaps these patents aren't as dangerous as they seem. Any lawyers know for sure?