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.'"

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.

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.

Re:Open standards often are patented

[mrchaotica]

It is available under a reasonable and non-discriminatory (RAND) license.

Right, and nowadays, with the existence of Free Software, the only licenses that should qualify as "reasonable and non-discriminatory" are ones that Free Software can use!

Re:There can be only one

[cp.tar]

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.

However, it is still MS Office that is the most widely used office program, and at least here in Croatia, where nearly all software for private use - barring pre-installed Windows[1] - is still pirated (the businesses feel a moderate fear from the BSA, but that's about it), that means that the bestest and latest version of Office will be adopted, if in no other way, then by school kids, and therefore their parents as well.

Luckily, the fact that the BSA is a real threat means that (small) businesses will be very reluctant to migrate from Office 97 or 2000 to a new version, which costs oh, about the average month's pay. Per computer.

All in all, in order for ODF to become more widely accepted, at least in Croatia, all we FOSSies should do is approach the people we know are pirates and, uh, present OpenOffice.org as a viable alternative to fines and prosecution. It's high time we adopted some of our opponents' methods. </evil>

[1] If I mean a plural, should I say Windowses? ;)

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 [sun.com]

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 [oasis-open.org]. 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.

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 [sun.com]. There are several important differences, as I pointed out at the time [sun.com]:

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.

Re:Why either or?

[ozmanjusri]

there is nothing preventing the existence of multiple standards for documents.

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 [openmalaysiablog.com]

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.

Re: Open standards often are patented

[Sycraft-fu]

That's the "unlimited" fee, meaning you pay that amount, you can have as many copies as you like. The per player fee is about $5. So if you wanted to compile and use XivD for both encoding and decoding it's be about a $10 fee (separate charges for encoding and decoding). Thus really no matter how you hash it, it's a pretty reasonable fee. I'm not saying a no-fee codec wouldn't be nicer, and there's people who agree. There's a reason Vorbis is getting used in more and more games. Tohmpson charges per title for MP3 decoder support, Xiph doesn't. However really open standards do tend to be fairly reasonable fees and they are certainly non-discriminatory.

As for free software, where it leave it is that it can be free as in speech not free as in beer. One doesn't have to follow the other. In terms of Linux, a solution would be to setup a fund. Have a player (or maybe just libraries that players call) that has purchased the relevant licenses, then people can use them freely. The source can be distributed no problem, everything works.

I'm not saying it is how people would ideally like it, but I keep hearing that the reason for free software is the free speech aspect, the fact that you have the code, that you can alter it yourself. People have explicitly told me it isn't about costing nothing and that indeed you CAN make money with OSS. Ok fine, if that's the case then I don't see this as a big deal. It only really seems like a big deal when in fact the motivation is freeloading and not paying for software.

I'm not at all a fan of patents in their current state, but I don't think it is unreasonable for people to want compensation for their work. Unless we have a communism in our whole society, programmers are going to need a way to make money to eat too. It's not cheap or easy to develop new compression technology, I work at a university that does JPEG 2000 research and there's a lot of time and money spent on it. That's got to come from somewhere, and the people that put it up want a return. You'll find it hard to convince anyone to invest millions in a project if they know that when it is complete they can expect to see zero in return, and you can't expect the workers to do it for free, they've got to eat.

Re:Open standards often are patented

[JohnFluxx]

Not to mention that the MS one doesn't cover any future versions.

If MS add a feature to their 'standard' and release that as a new version, then that new version isn't covered by the protection. Programs would not be allowed to add in those new features.

The ODF one, of course, guarantees any future versions are covered.

Re:Why would they say that?

[JohnFluxx]

Brian Jones, the Microsoft Office manager, talks about it here:

http://blogs.msdn.com/brian_jones/archive/2007/05/ 11/german-standards-body-creates-new-working-group -to-focus-on-interoperability.aspx [msdn.com]

It seems pretty awful. The way they've had to do it themselves with OOXML is save as RTF, then in the background load the RTF file and save that as OOXML.

It seems their code base really is not designed for such changes.