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Developers Warned over OOXML Patent Risk
Tendraes brings us a story about legal experts who are warning that Microsoft's "covenant not to sue" over use of the OOXML specification is both ambiguous and untested. Developers wishing to make use of OOXML are unlikely to understand the complex legal language of the Open Specification Promise, and such a document - being neither a release nor a contract - has never been tested in court. From ZDNet Asia:
"David Vaile, executive director of the Cyberspace Law and Policy Center at the University of New South Wales, said that Microsoft participants at a recent symposium on the issue found it challenging to explain how an ordinary person 'or even an ordinary lawyer' could easily determine which parts of the specification were covered. 'This lack of certainty would mean a cautious lawyer may be reluctant to advise any third party to rely on the promise without extensive and potentially quite expensive analysis, and even that could be inconclusive,' Vaile said. 'In turn, this could restrict its viability as a usable standard for less well-resourced users, including small developers and many public organizations.'"
Eradicate them from the earth, rewrite everything in simple English and we'll all be a lot better off.
The trick is to stay away from Microsoft if you don't want trouble with the law, with licences or with vendor lockin.
This is a good read... Ron Yu's background paper on patent approaches in OOXML.
If "it's not been tested in court" or "non-lawyers may not understand legalese" is all you've got, STFU.
If M$ made no legal commitments at all, people would complain. When they do, anyone beyond the mental age of twelve years old knows that you can always find something to complain about in a legal contract. Lawyers are hated for a reason.
Don't believe the hype. Don't believe the FUD. There are real reasons to complain about M$. This isn't one of them.
Microsoft would write some obscure language piece of literature. This just goes to further show that either they are retards that can't speak in plain English, or they do in fact have a hidden agenda. There is no good reason to hide behind obscure legal documents.
Look, if it was a good spec then there would be reason to debate it's license, implied or otherwise. There would be reason to discuss Microsofts standing.
It isn't a good spec, so it isn't relevant.
IANAL, but it looks like the PTO has some mechanism by which a patent owner can reassign ownership or a patent. If so, Microsoft need only transfer the patent to the public domain or renounce ownership to solve this. Some wishy-washy covenant won't hack it unless it is irrevocable.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
The first step to "open" or "sharing" or whatever TF you want to call is is making stuff accessible (ie easy to use and understand) and making clear licensing is part of that.
If every OpenOffice user needs to first get a legal opinion before using OO, then they may as well buy MS Office. Companies that want to be legal won't just take the advice of www.jimmy.org.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
It appears that Microsoft has about 280 patents around OOXML and related technologies. It also has a large number of patents that read on ODF. We're making a list of these and hope to be able to publish them soon.
There are also several patents from third parties that read on OOXML, and in theory ISO should halt the process while these are examined and cleared. It looks like ISO won't do that.
Microsoft has several techniques to keep OOXML a captive standard controlled by a single vendor. Complexity is one. But patents are the very best technique.
Note also that OOXML's complexity is mostly because it's a dump of a legacy format. Some upcoming MS ISO proposals are very clean technically, but also very heavily patented.
It seems clear that the OSP is worthless for GPL implementations, the biggest threat to Microsoft.
At the same time it's worth noting that the format being voted on by ISO is not the format implemented by Office. There are over 2,300 changes and the two formats are not compatible. The reason for pushing for ISO standardisation is to let MS market their formats as "standard", while in fact implementing non-standard vendor-specific formats. And then, using patent threats against anyone who tries to reverse-engineer those.
It's a nice con trick. Many national bodies have realized what's going on but many are too corrupted or too ignorant to understand.
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But I like my healthy irradiated glow!
I'm confused--am I missing something obvious? How can a standard be patented? Isn't the whole point of a standard to specify a format or design requirement for something so that anybody that implements the standard will do it properly? I can understand patenting/copyrighting a particular implementation, but not the standard itself.
Government's idea of a balanced budget: take money from the right pocket to balance...oh who am I kidding?
* (i) an unequivocal promise by words or conduct,
* (ii) evidence that there is a change in position of the promisee as a result of the promise (reliance but not necessarily to their detriment),
* (iii) inequity if the promisor were to go back on the promise. Microsoft's words are clearly unequivocal. There is clearly a change in position on the part of a developer who, having read Microsoft's promise, decides to incorporate this format into their software. It would clearly be inequitable then for Microsoft to take action against them.
Untested in court my ass. The first case to use it was 131 years ago.
Is *anyone, *anywhere, just aching to get their hands on the OOXML spec 'cause then they can springboard off of a bunch of the cool innovative things that MS formats can do?
Or is everyone, like me, just kinda hoping it's open enough so that we can sorta-promise clients that the software we develop will sorta-work with their piles of legacy, cruft-infested data. (At least, it'll sorta work until MS changes their document spec again and force-upgrades everyone through Genuine Windows YoureScrewed.)
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
Both ODF and MS-OOXML are covered by patents. Hasn't Sun, IBM, etal. issued "covenants not to sue" that apply to ODF as well? In simple english, can someone please explain the difference? Why are Sun covenants GPL friendly and Microsoft's not?
Given the latests news about SCO, Gates' connection and the $100m plan, as well as previous involvement of the Vole, anything less than crystal clear and open sourced, is another trap with MS.
...get an axe. I'm not sure whether this is a Microsoft FAIL or a lawyer FAIL. Oh, heck...I'll post'em both... http://wwwfail.com/?url=microsoft.com http://wwwfail.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.forcounsel.com%2Fproducts%2F1265.jpg
Is Microsoft's definition of "Microsoft Necessary Claims" broad enough and clear enough to allow a third party to implement the actual .docx format without legal harassment by Microsoft or Microsoft's sock puppets? With Microsoft, as with the devil, you have to check for weasel language in everything they say.
OK,everyone who needed to be told that you can't trust Microsoft, raise your hand.
More than 60,000 Windows programs won't run on Linux.
The real protection you enjoy is that suing you for patent infringement would do too much damage to MS's credibility. MS simply has too much to lose if people start being overly suspicious of relying on the developer information they provide. Ultimately their entire existence is predicated on people being able to take information about specifications they provide (windows APIs) and use them without fear of suit. They simply can't afford to take advantage of some legal loophole to sue you given the damage to their reputation it would cause.
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too:
I promise not to sue, even though you may be in violation of our IP! We need thousands of you out there using this before we would consider such a thing anyway. http://fakesteveballmer.blogspot.com/
The "covenant not to sue" is indeed not a particularly sound guarantee. On the other hand, if Microsoft sued over patent infringement in 10 years, I think they'd have a hard time recovering anything: any infringement wouldn't be willful and any it's hard to claim damages over something that they themselves said anybody could use.
Given there are a number of projects which translate OOXML to ODF and back, I would simply always develop with ODF and translate to and from OOXML when it is required
Microsoft have really lowered the barrier to making games on Windows and Xbox 360. XNA and C# have made it really easy to make games but they're so tied to Microsoft that there is no hope of a port. Most code includes look like this..
using System;
using System.Diagnostics;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using Microsoft.Xna.Framework;
using Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Content;
using Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Graphics;Simple, but Microsoft specific.
Making a cross platform game is a lot harder if you are trying to port something written from Windows because you don't even realise until it happens how non-standard you code can be between operating systems. Perhaps you're using the Windows registry or you're using DirectX. Your only hope really is to score an xbox arcade contract with the publisher Microsoft and if you have written your game in C# and XNA you can give up hope of a port unless you're going to go back and re-write some code in c++.
If you want to make a cross platform game then my advice is to write your code on a different platform (Mac, Linux, etc) and then port it to Windows. You'll find the port much easier this way around as it forces you to write your code to be cross platform and it leaves you open to some great debugging tools such as LatencyTop to help you figure out why your game is losing FPS.
That said you can't do all your game programming on Linux because the tools just aren't there. RenderMonkey for shader programming is a good example, but you can easily just do your shader programming on one machine and use the shaders in Linux. Ogre 3D for example has a shader exporter from RenderMonkey.
Two things that bother me, besides the fact that instead of releasing the patents to the public they released a "promise" not to sue over those patents.
What does Covered Implementation [sic] and Necessary Claims [sic] mean? As far as this developer understands, Covered Implementation implicates that the promise only covers you as long as you are implementing a OOXML editor, other software might not be so protected, for instance I have had to add "excel" exporters (actually html pages with a different mime type) in some web applications, if my application exports documents to OOXML am I protected?
And if all implementations are covered what does it mean to be a Covered Implementation? Is there such a thing as an Uncovered Implementation? And what does Necessary Claims mean? And why the random Capitalization?
But... the future refused to change.
Really, one should just doubt any license or contract that is difficult to understand - like the GPL. Dangerous pot calling the kettle black logic here.
and it's patent encumbered. You need to make a payment
to mepgla.com if you sell an encoder.
"Q: I am a developer/distributor/user of software that is licensed under the GPL, does the Open Specification Promise apply to me?"
.. the only time Microsoft can withdraw its promise .. is if that person or company brings .. a patent infringement lawsuit against Microsoft .."
"A:
So the whole motive in this legalistic shell game is to protect MS from being sued over claiming IP ownership in Open Source software.
translation: by signing this agreement you acknowledge Microsofts IP claims against Open Source.
davecb5620@gmail.com
And likewise, the GPL itself is both ambiguous and untested. But for some strange reason, these very lawyers aren't warning people away from using GPL'd software.
I wonder why? Could they be biased, or are they pushing an agenda? It should certainly be looked into.
If vendor lockin is a concern, then it's probably of the utmost importance to avoid FOSS. With the open hostility to commercial software and applications now codified in the GPLv3, there's no way in hell you are ever going to unlock yourself from FOSS, short of burning down all your work and data, then starting over.
So really, I can't see how FOSS "avoids vendor lockin". You might want to read some of the horror stories of people who were trapped in OpenSQL, and their company outgrew it and moved to a "real" database package like MS-SQL.