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

Why am I not surprised

[jimmyhat3939]

While I'm not certain this is part of an overarching strategy by Microsoft, it's articles like these that make it hard to take them seriously when they claim to want to standardize. First it was just "embrace & extend," now it's this mess with patents.

In my opinion, the right solution to these patent problems is eliminating software and/or business process patents.

Re:Why am I not surprised

[Anonymous Coward]

One another option is -

1. Cost of patenting based on the wealth of the patentee. This should help the small garage inventor + actual real good innovations. Patent trolling will be less effective.
2. Patent to be supported by product within a period of 3 years. It is the responsibility of the patent holder to provide proof that a product that was created by his patent has been made after 3 years. This product has to be a) made by the patent holder or b) the patent holder has given license to the company which creates it. Otherwise the patent lapses. This would again take care of the patent trolls + help actual good inventions
3. The cost of patent to be borne across the years. Every 5 years the patent has be re-issued with quite a high fee (again based on the wealth of patentee). This means that only good useful products are under patent for the complete duration of the patent. This again will support the basic idea of patenting, i.e. really good useful ideas not to be kept under wraps, and not the small ideas.

I guess these ideas should help modify the patent system so that
a) Patent office gets more money which means more people, which means better results
b) Small guy inventor is supported
c) Real good ideas can be patented for the whole duration
d) Company still can work freely without struggling with frivolous patents, while producing real good products under patents themselves.

Re:Why am I not surprised

[splict]

While you have some interesting ideas, I can't see them working in practice. They generally rely on different charges for patents based on the size of the company. Unfortunately, bypassing this is trivial.

1. Start a new company
2. Patent something
3. License patent to big company

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

[killjoe]

Given that there are two competing potential standards and one has patents and the other doesn't then why should ISO choose the one with patents? Of course it also doesn't help that one standard is 600o pages long and can only be 100% implemented by MS.

Clearly the ISO bodies are being corrupted (packed) by MS and I really don't understand why. MS has never obeyed any standard and they will not obey this one either. Why does ISO even pretend that MS has respect for standards? Why do would they ratify a standard which will immediately be extended by MS?

Re:Open standards often are patented

[realdodgeman]

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

Microsoft is going to break this one anyway, and without getting punished for it. They don't need to change the specification, just their own implementation. And then suddenly nobody that actually followed the specification is able to read documents produced in MS office.

Re:Open standards often are patented

[mrchaotica]

Clearly the ISO bodies are being corrupted (packed) by MS and I really don't understand why. MS has never obeyed any standard and they will not obey this one either.

Well, obviously Microsoft doesn't care about standards itself. However, others do, and Microsoft wants to abuse that fact. Understand now?

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

Re:Open standards often are patented

[ozmanjusri]

both are covered by an almost identical perpetual promise.

The blog includes a link to the Sun promise http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/office/ipr.ph p. If you'd read that and TFA, you'd have noticed that Sun give blanket indemnity for any implementation of ODF, while Microsoft only grants indemnity for the specification in the proposed MOOXML standard.

Since the MOOXML format is impossible to fully implement without using external specifications not covered by the covenant, Microsoft can still sue someone who implements MOOXML in their software.

There can be only one

[pwizard2]

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.

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 /. 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.

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.

"Auto space like Word 95"

[mrchaotica]

'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.

Oh, please.

[pallmall1]

it was put together over a number of years

That's how long it would take to read the 6000 page spec, let alone to write it out. How is it that Microsoft and the ISO could reasonably expect the spec to be thoroughly examined in the fast-track time period alloted? It's absurd. The sheer size of the spec should have disqualified it for fast-track approval.

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.

The nice thing about standards

[flyingfsck]

is that there are so many of them.

Microsoft XML standard compliance would be just as useful as their POSIX compliance.

Re:Not all standards are equal

[pallmall1]

I'm not saying that is the case, I am not a document expert and I haven't looked at either...

You could have saved an awful lot of electronic ink if you would have just stopped right there. It's readily apparent why you don't think 6000 pages is too long. :)

Microsoft covenant inferior to Sun covenant

[WebMink]

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:

1. Microsoft make their promise contingent on the patents being "essential", at their sole judgement, to the implementation involved. There may be several ways to implement each feature; if you happen to pick the one covered by the patent, you are using one that's not "essential" since you could be implementing one of the alternative ways. You can't know this without extensive research and legal advice.
2. They also make it contingent on "conformance", again at their sole discretion. Partial implementations may be at risk, and since open source development is done in public, so may in-progress full implementations.
3. Thirdly, despite placing these limitations on their outward grant, they expect all recipients of the grants to refrain from all litigation, not just that bounded by either conformance or essential claims.

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.

1900 is my personal favourite

[fritsd]

See OOXML part 4 par. 3.17.4.1 , p. 2522.

For legacy reasons, an implementation using the 1900 date base system shall treat 1900 as though it was a leap year.

Legacy reasons?? In a new document format standard?

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:

The attribute may have the values gregorian, gengou, ROC, hanja_yoil, hanja, hijri, jewish, buddhist or an arbitrary string value. If this attribute is not specified, the default calendar system is used.

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?