Patent Threats In OOXML

An anonymous reader notes an initiative by the New Zealand Open Source Society to weigh in on the question of standardizing Microsoft's OOXML. The organization has authored a white paper (available in several formats, HTML here) laying out the ways in which the OOXML spec falls short of what a standard should be. From the article: "'If OOXML goes through as an ISO standard, the IT industry, government and business will [be] encumbered with a 6,000-page specification peppered with potential patent liabilities' said New Zealand OSS President Don Christie. 'Alarm bells are going off in many parts of the world over OOXML. Normally ISO draft standards would be drawn up by a number of stakeholder organizations, involving an often slow process of consensus building and knowledge sharing. Since many aspects of the office document format remain proprietary, OOXML has not taken this development track.'"

Comments

Open standards often are patented

[Sycraft-fu]

MPEG-4 would be an excellent example. It is an open standard, but has a whole lot of patents covering it. Open standard doesn't mean no cost, and it doesn't mean patent free. It means three things:

1) The format is open and not subject to change/closure at the whim of a company (generally controlled by a standards body).

2) It is available under a reasonable and non-discriminatory (RAND) license. The two subsets of that are:

a) Reasonable. The fees required are in line with whatever it is. It's not a "Oh you want a license for that video codec? Ok $1,000,000 per player, no cap." That's clearly unreasonable and designed to keep people from licensing it.

b) Non-discriminatory. This means that you have to license to all comers. You can't decide you like what this company is doing but not this other company. Anyone who pays the moneys get the licenses.

3) All patent holders have agreed that the format can use their parents and that the only compensation they'll get is from those fees.

That's it. There are plenty of open standards that are indeed not free. Do not confuse open standard and open source. This is where the legal issues relating to MPEG and such with Linux come in to play. MPEG LA allows source only works for no licensing fee, but if you want to actually compile and use that, you need to pay a fee. If you don't, you are technically breaking the law. Thus for a Linux distro to include it without paying a fee could be a problem. The developers of the distro could pay if they wanted, it is about $100,000 for an unlimited license, but if they don't then it is a problem. That money is to pay the patent holders. Despite being an open standard, MPEG-4 is covered by about 28 PAGES of patents.

Re:Open standards often are patented

[ozmanjusri]

Actually ODF has similar encumberances

No it doesn't. This FUD has been addressed long ago. http://blogs.sun.com/webmink/entry/raising_the_bar _on_patents

Netscape 3?

[clarkn0va]

From the white paper:

OOXML allows export of HTML targeted for 3 classes of browsers however these 3 options are at least ten years old (from 1997).

and

[t]he restricted list of values provided in the list of supportable browsers, which only includes IE3, IE4 and Netscape3 and Netscape4.

Wow.