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Microsoft Eases Licensing On Office 2003 Formats

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the opening-up dept.

kfiller writes "Microsoft has negotiated a deal with the state of Massachusetts to lower licensing restrictions on the Excel and Word XML formats in Office 2003, in exchange for the state to reconsider their focus on adopting 'open standards' to adopting 'open formats'. Is this just another move to encroach on the open source community?"

3 of 208 comments (clear)

  1. The old MicroSoft Adage (tm) by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    Extend and embrace. (tm)

  2. This could be good if it's a trend by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    PJ at groklaw has a good read on this at
    http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=200501141 8070774.
    The devil is in the licensing details, but maybe Microsoft has [decided|been forced] to play nice in order to not be excluded.

  3. Re:I think MA may be just pulling a Dell... by jackbird · · Score: 3, Informative
    No, this is about file formats, not applications, and they do appear to be fairly serious about it.

    From the article: "...In our definition, "Open Formats" are specifications for data file formats that are based on an underlying Open Standard developed by an open community and affirmed by a standards body or de facto format standards controlled by other entities that are fully documented and available for public use under perpetual, royalty free, and nondiscriminatory terms.

    ... An example of an Open Format that we have already characterized is TXT text files and PDF document formats.

    ...It should be reasonably obvious for a lay person who looks at the concept of Public Documents that we've got to keep them independent and free forever because it is an overriding imperative of the American democratic system. That we cannot have our public documents locked up in some kind of proprietary format or locked up in a format that you need to get a proprietary system to use sometime in the future. So, one of the things that we're incredibly focused on is insuring that the public records remain independent of underlying systems and applications insuring their accessibility over very long periods of time. In the IT business a long period of time is about 18 months, in government it's about 300 years, so we have slightly different perspective."

    This not only goes far beyond "flirting with open source to get a better deal," it ignores that angle completely - they'd be happy to buy MS Office if they know they (or anyone else!) can hack together a reader for the format in 300 years based on publicly av ailable information.