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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.'"
In my opinion, the right solution to these patent problems is eliminating software and/or business process patents.
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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.
There can only be one standard. One will survive and be commonly implemented , and the other won't become widespead and will only be used by fringe elements.
/. stories) that the OOXML architecture seems rather shoddy and looks like something that was quickly put together. MSFT is trying to force it through iso rather thanb let OOXML succeed through its own merit... that alone draws suspicion to the quality of OOXML.
ODF has been gaining ground in the EU and in other parts of the world, whereas OOXML has to start from a dead stop. It's only asset is the marketing power of MSFT behind it, but that may not be enough. It is already clear (from other
"It is a denial of justice not to stretch out a helping hand to the fallen; that is the common right of humanity."
and
Wow.I am literally 3000 tokens away from the chaotic crossbow --Stephen
'Nuff said.
The existence of shit like that in the spec -- not to mention the obsolete HTML export described in the post below yours -- indicate that the OOXML architecture is just as shoddy as the grandparent post asserts!
In other words, he's right and you're trolling, so STFU and HAND.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Not even Microsoft believes in the technical merit of their own spec, which is why they are resorting to their usual underhanded and corrupt tactics.
3 things about computers: they're alive, they're self-aware, and they hate your guts.
is that there are so many of them.
Microsoft XML standard compliance would be just as useful as their POSIX compliance.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Perhaps the MS standard is a better standard. I'm not saying that is the case, I am not a document expert and I haven't looked at either, but perhaps it's a better standard. A case of something like that can be seen with MPEG-4 vs Theora. Theora is royalty free, yet you don't see it considered for really anything. Why? Not a very good standard. They've finally got it bitstream frozen but the encoders and decoders have a long way to go. Any stability problems aside, it just doesn't produce compression results on par with MPEG-4. Hence you find it isn't widely used. Lacking patents and royalties is an advantage, but not a decisive one. If you are Apple and you've got a choice between a standard that you are going to have to drop some money on, maybe even $1,000,000 for all your Macs but that gives excellent video compression or one that's 100% free but isn't nearly so good and has some problems, which do you go for? Maybe rather which did they do for, which is MPEG-4. No royalties is good, but bitchin Quictime trailers is more important to them.
.DOC format which can have all kinds of formatting and just about everything embedded in it. Thus it would be better if the standard they released was precise, and vague. Vague means that they can implement an incompatible version and still be "standards compliant" since the standard specifies little. Precise makes that much harder.
So it is possible that the ISO finds that to be a similar case here. Perhaps they find that the MS standard is better. I'm not saying you necessairily find the same thing, however it is fairly clear that you have an extreme anti-MS bias. That's fine, you are entitled to your viewpoint, but you should recognise that it may bias the way you perceive things. Your statement that "Clearly the ISO bodies are being corrupted," is not a true one. I'm not saying that it is untrue that it is happening, I am saying the truth can't be established thus it is not clear. You are inferring that from the fact that the ISO isn't doing what you want.
I'm not trying to say you are wrong, I am just saying you need to take a step back and evaluate how your dislike for Microsoft colours your views of the situation. You also need to understand that, from a standards point of view, patents are ok. Many open standards are parented. SDRAM would be another one, that's a major point of JEDEC. The RAM makers get together, decide on RAM specs, and come to an agreement on patents so that everyone can use patented technology.
Also I'm not sure why the standard being 6000 pages is a problem. A complex standard will be lengthy. If it isn't, that means things aren't well defined and there can be implementation problems. I mean consider that the CSS2 standard is 338 pages by itself. Just CSS2, never mind the rest of the standards that go along with it for the modern web (HTML 4 is about 400 pages for example). I could well see a print document standard, especially one intended to contain all sorts of rich media formats, to need to be a few thousand pages. As another example, the Adobe PDF reference spec is over 1300 pages (for version 1.7).
A short, simple, standard means either that what you are specing is something that doesn't do a whole lot, or that your spec is very, very incomplete and leaves a whole lot up to the app to decide. Well we know that a document format isn't simple, especially if we are talking something to replace the
All I'm saying is you need to consider that it isn't as cut and dried as "patents vs no patents." Outside the OSS community, patents aren't considered so evil. You can argue they should be, but that isn't the case. Thus considering a patented format isn't anything out of the ordinary. So long as the criteria such as RAND licensing and such are met, the standards body is probably happy. I mean remember that MS has a standard video format, a competitor to MPEG-4 called VC-1. It is controlled by SMPTE and is used on HD-DVD and Blu Ray (many HD-DVD titles seem to like to use VC-1) along with MPEG-4 Part 10 and MPEG-2. Like the others, it isn't free, is encumbered by patents (not just MS patents) but is an open standard.
I don't normally respond to trolls, but I want to make sure this is clear. Despite the claims of Microsoft's representatives, their patent covenant is not the same as Sun's. There are several important differences, as I pointed out at the time:
Items 1 and 2 are especially important. By reserving unaccountable judgement over what is and is not covered, they prevent implementors having certainty they will not face patent issues. This is exactly the way to chill the enthusiasm of open source developers, for whom certainty over their freedoms is the cornerstone of community. It's exactly the reason I made sure Sun's covenant was not crippled in the same way.
I have now had several reports of Microsoft's representatives claiming their covenant is the same as Sun's; it is not, please make sure anyone who says so is challenged.
There's one more issue of note, which the NZ paper makes clear. Microsoft explicitly uses proprietary formats within their MS-OOXML specification (DrawingML for example). If they want to provide comfort to open source developers, they need to go further and cover all referenced formats with their "promise" as well.
Always bet on the Three Letter Acronym. Five Letter Acronyms almost never succeed when faced with a competing Three Letter Acronym. You can ignore OOXML.
Apart from common sense, of course.
This is another red herring that has been addressed many times before, including here. http://www.openmalaysiablog.com/2007/02/microsofts _defi.html
Microsoft is spinning duplicate standards as "choice" when in fact acceptance of MOOXML as a standard would be a breach of ISO's mandate.
"one standard, one test, and one conformity assessment procedure accepted everywhere." Microsoft is pushing this line heavily in their attempt to subvert the approvals process in Standards Australia.It's pretty clear proof that they have no intention of allowing interoperability and are simply using MOOXML as a means of spiking ODF.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
Reasonable means just that: reasonable. Something doesn't have to be free to be reasonable. If you think that free is the only reasonable price, you'll probably find that people consider you to be what is unreasonable there. Non-discriminatory simply means offering the same thing to everyone. Whatever the terms are, they have to apply no matter who you are. Doesn't mean that everyone has to agree with the terms, just means they have to be equal.
For example I can charge a $5 cover for everyone for a bar. That would be a reasonable and non-discriminatory fee. If I charged nothing for blacks, $5 for whites and $50 for asians, that's a discriminatory fee, I am charging different amounts based on who you are.
Also, I was always told that free software was about "free as in speech" not "free as in I'm sleeping on your couch."
I agree, the term "Open Standard" is used very inappropriately by RAND, M$ ... and many others.
... "International Standard", but in fact when proprietary content is used in a standard (legally) it is not "OPEN" and/or freely available to anyone, and is anti-competitive and anti-capitalist by making basic (non-creative/non-original) technology requirements private property for more socialist/communist (as in anti-capitalism) corporate-welfare.
...] concept/intent.
.... Repeated misuse of the term "Open" by industry, governments, agencies, foundations ... should not be allowed. The term "Open" when used in medicine, science, engineering, communications, literature, music, art, technology ... has a definite (though unregistered) trademark value in business and international economics that is being intentionally misused by industry to financially harm the public good, "Open Economics", and "Open Businesses" globally.
Correctly stated it is simply a standard, not "OPEN".
If you want to use a two word phrase, then the correct phrase for a few decades now has been and still is an "Industry Standard".
An "Industry Standard" is sometimes called an ANSI, ISO
By accepted technologist and L/FOSS convention dating back to the 1980's the usage of the term "OPEN" is conceptually reserved to products/ideas... that closely follow the "Public Property" [GPL, "Open Content", "Open Standards"
Just like a public park, which is always paid for by the public or philanthropic individuals/foundations, the property is provided and developed for the public welfare. Software patents and industry standards are an obvious attempt by corporatist and their governments to prevent access [easement] to public property that could/would limit the private property's owners attempts to control public property use by citizens.
I know you see my direction of debate/argument, the word "Open" when capitalized or in all caps (like an acronym) should have as much legal standing as the term "Microsoft", "California", "Navajo" "The United States" "Organic"
Revisionist-spin is never reality, but can be dogma for fools and "Exploiticians" to use for legal rights to the wind, they may even stupidly try to hold the wind for themselves.
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
Misnomer: Open Standards are often patented ...
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http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=273615&cid
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
MPEG-4 would be an excellent example. It is an open standard, but has a whole lot of patents covering it.
That's an example of a scandal, not good practice. You can only believe that it's good practice if you believe in software and business method patents. Both of those things have been discredited as a corruption of the patent process and both are stiflingly anti-competitive. RAND is an obfuscation that reasonable standards bodies reject.
OOXML would be an even bigger scandal because it does not even pass your ludicrously low qualifications.
1) The format is open and not subject to change/closure at the whim of a company (generally controlled by a standards body).
OOXML is neither open nor complete because it contains insane specifications that basically say, "do this exactly like Word for Mac with a HP Laser Jet printer did" without further instructions.
The whole point of OOXML is for M$ to have a "standard" they control. If they wanted an open and reasonable standard, they would be using ODF.
All patent holders have agreed that the format can use their parents and that the only compensation they'll get is from those fees.
M$ always presses their advantage. You may wish they did not, but company history proves otherwise, and people who partner with or trust M$ are always crushed.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Given that Sun's ODF plug-in for MS Word does exactly that (simply adds ODF to the list of supported formats everywhere they occur in Word, including allowing it to be set as the default), it makes me wonder why Microsoft would say that.
I call prior art!
"The best thing about standards is that there are so many of them to choose from" (unknown, but ancient attribution)
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
I agree completely and I approached OSI at OSCON with a view to OSI creating a definition of just such a patent covenant (having Sun create it unilaterally is unlikely to be welcomed by IBM and Microsoft!). My first attempt at an outline was in my blog posting on the subject and I hope the OSI Board will commission a group next month.
Basically they are saying that although the Gregorian calendar says 1900 is NOT a leap year, from now on it should be, otherwise a certain program's spreadsheet data wouldn't be correct anymore because one programmer screwed up getting the dates right in said legacy program, many years ago.
Never mind that the world didn't start in 1900 (dates before either 1900 or 1904 are NOT IMPLEMENTED)
Never mind bothering to implement other calendars (Islamic, Chinese etc.) which might be of interest in large parts of the world.
WHY didn't they just use ISO 8601, like ODF did?
Speaking of ODF, this is what they put in par. 14.7.11 (p. 523) if you don't believe me:
So basically, my gripe with OOXML is not that it's legally unclear, or not open enough, it's that it's clearly not written to be A STANDARD. Think with me pls:
If the OASIS people overlooked an important calendar/date problem, and there is consensus, it can be added in the next version of the standard. All existing ODF documents are safe.
vs.
If the ECMA/Microsoft people decide one day to correct this bogus "1900 should from now on be a leap year" feature, all OOXML text documents that contain dates will have to be checked, and the ones that turn out to have dates from 1900 have to be corrected.
See the difference?
To be, or not to be: isn't that quite logical, Slashdot Beta?
A better iea than #3:
ALL patents and copyrights expire after 5 to 7 years and are NOT renewable by amyone. After 5 to 7 years EVERYTHING is in the public domain. And software/business process pattents are eliminated completely. AND, if a corporation buys a patent, or a copyrighted work, that does NOT extend the patent/copyright period...it still goes public domain 5 to 7 years after the ORIGINAL release/publishing/grant date, NO MATTER WHAT. Patented inventions must be in production within 2 years of the grant date, and within 1 year of a purchase date.
When a patent expires, full details must be published/released by the patent holder, and must be easily available to the general public at no cost. Published books and other written work will be made available to the general public in ODF format at no charge when copyrights expire.
Music will be made available to the general public as lirics on ODF format, and as high quality MP3 and OGG music files that are freely available at no charge.
This would help prevent large corporations from buying and suppressing inventions that could be beneficial to society as a whole, but might reduce their profits. (can you say Big Oil?)
I find it interesting that this article has drawn so few comments. Is this because the /. reader base has already made its' mind up about OOXML vs ODF? Or is it a sign of boredom over this issue? Or apathy? Or has the readership changed to one more concerned about Free access to movies and games, and doesn't care about a data format war that has most concern to Governments and Corporations?
I feel uneasy about this, as It may be that as the voices of the informed fall silent, we will lose the battle to keep the access to important data available to the common man.
How does one receive a patent and keep the technology proprietary at the same time? A part of the patent application is supposed to be a description of the object being patented in sufficient detail so that a skilled individual is able to reproduce said object. The two attributes (proprietary and patented) appear to be mutually exclusive.
Have gnu, will travel.
But who defines "reasonable" and "non-discriminatory", especially taking into account the difference between use by a hobbyist and by a professional, or among use by an individual, by a non-profit organization, and by a for-profit organization?
Your sig is apropos:
There ain't no such thing as proprietary standards only proprietary formats. Standards are by definition open. A "proprietary standard" is a standard whose implementation requires essential patents for which royalty-free licenses allowing implementation in free software are not available. The standard defining an MP3 bitstream is such a proprietary standard.