Patent Threats In OOXML 109
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.'"
Why am I not surprised (Score:5, Interesting)
In my opinion, the right solution to these patent problems is eliminating software and/or business process patents.
Re:Why am I not surprised (Score:4, Interesting)
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 (Score:4, Insightful)
1. Start a new company
2. Patent something
3. License patent to big company
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Better idea (Score:1)
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 th
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As for copyrights, I feel that they should last 20-40 years for long books and 10-20 years for more 'disposable' works such as 3D models, music, films, and software, with unaltered or slightly altered photographs and instructional works ineligible for copyright.
After the copyright expires, the author should merely be required to publish the source of the last five major revisions with a
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1. Cost of patenting based on the wealth of the patentee.
Almost all USPTO fees are different for SME (small-medium sized) and large entities.
2. Patent to be supported by product within a period of 3 years.
This would be hard for the "small garage inventor" would it not? Depending on the market for which there may be a need, an inventor could be sitting on a patent for 17 years before a A-Large-company realizes it is something they need (in certain cases this is regardless of whether the inventor promotes it or not). So this may actually end up hurting the inventor.
3. The cost of patent to be borne across the years.
One must pay maintaince fees 3.5, 7.5 and 12.5 years after
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But why would I bother paying for licensing if I could just wait three years
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Their lack of support for ODF didn't make that clear?
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I'd rather believe "Osama Bin Laden wants to become a nun".
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Open standards often are patented (Score:5, Informative)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
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But why there are so many there that wants to create an bad standard ?
Dont ask me that.
Re:Open standards often are patented (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, obviously Microsoft doesn't care about standards itself. However, others do, and Microsoft wants to abuse that fact. Understand now?
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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/microsoft s _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 Austr
Oh come now... (Score:3, Insightful)
I call prior art!
"The best thing about standards is that there are so many of them to choose from" (unknown, but ancient attribution)
Not all standards are equal (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Not all standards are equal (Score:5, Funny)
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There's abundant evidence in TFA to show that MOOXML is clearly an encumbered and inferior format. You were probably modded overrated for not knowing much about the topic.
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It is clearly the case.
Microsoft have stuffed committees in Sweden, Kenya, Belgium, Denmark and Australia. They have blocked access to members from Sun and IBM in Portugal and are trying to subvert the process in Spain, New Zealand and other voting countries.
If MOOXML is truly an open format, what benefit do you think Microsoft w
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OOXML is a scam. Only Microsoft, or someone in a comprehensive licensing agreement, could ever adequately implement the "standard". Anyone else would still be forced to reverse engineer, just like the Op
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OpenDocument format is already an ISO standard and has been since last year.
I think OOXML has already achieved Microsoft objective of creating confusion and doubt in the marketplace. ISO should swiftly reject OOXML to help eliminate that doubt.
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> and I really don't understand why.
Actually, as a serving member of sc71l (the technical subcommittee
tasked with providing a recommendation to our ISO representative to
vote on behalf of the country)in South Africa, I object to this blatant
painting of all the committee members with the same brush.
Some of us have worked immensely hard to ensure that the OOXML
'spec' is never a 'standard'. We spent a great deal of time preparing
arguments, present
Re:Open standards often are patented (Score:5, Informative)
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 (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Open standards often are patented (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Microsoft covenant inferior to Sun covenant (Score:5, Informative)
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]:
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.
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Patent Freedom Covenant Definition (Score:2)
A kind of GPL for standards indemnification against patents that leaves no questions open and is applicable on a worldwide scale?
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 [sun.com] and I hope the OSI Board will commission a group next month.
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Sun's patent covenant applies to any version of the ODF specification in which Sun participates. Subsequent specifications built on those versions would also benefit from the covenant to the extent that they are the same as the earlier versions. Only changes introduced by the new version would be excluded. That's the sense in which the covenant was framed by Sun (I was involved), and in which it has been understood by the reasonable people who have read it to date. Analysis by independent counsel [softwarefreedom.org] raised no
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*sigh*. Sadly, this is yet another case of the FSF, in retrospect, applying what it wishes the GPL says... rather than what it actually says. A good example of this is the FSF's assertions regarding dynamic linking and the GPL. They have this tendancy to want to re-interpret the GPL to match their current line of thinking in ways that do not stand up to a literal reading of the document.
In this case, the FSF sees no conflict between the FSF's stance on
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Sorry, you're an anonymous troll or worse [slashdot.org]. Switching the subject to the endless twisty passages of flawed application of the GPL is a game and I'm not going there. You're twisting (or not reading) what I am writing (the legal opinion I linked was by SFLC, not FSF, and was on behalf of Apache; the use of the phrase "Essential Claims" by Moglen was part of a discussion of the OASIS patent policy where the term is used to define baseline RAND licensing; and so on).
I've given a reasoned interpretation and made
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So that's really how Sun and it's employees choose to operate? Nice.
Re:Open standards often are patented (Score:5, Insightful)
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This would be good... find a place where MSO '07 violates the MOOXML "Standard", then publicize the hell out of it. How long would it take ISO to rule out MOOXML as a standard if someone found an example of how MS doesn't even implement it correctly?
Or the easier thing... find two places in the standard that contradict each other, because in 6,000 pages there is going to be some internal inconsistancy.
Re:Open standards often are patented (Score:4, Informative)
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!
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No, sorry doesn't work that way (Score:2)
For example I can charge a $5 cover for everyone for a bar. Tha
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free software may not be "free as in I'm sleeping on your couch", but it certainly is "free as in you're free to use, modify and redistribute it without needing an army of lawyers and negotiating thousands of differe
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In the case of copyleft, it's also "free as in I can give you all the same rights I have." In order to be able to fulfill that when a patent license is involved, the license has to be sublicensable and transferrable. The issue is not cost; the issue is that the software and all associated licenses have to be able to travel from persons A to B to C without them having to get permission from s
Re: Open standards often are patented (Score:4, Interesting)
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I disagree with a couple of the things you've said:
but I don't think it is unreasonable for people to want compensation for their work
The fact that a person wants compensation for work does not make it reasonable for that person to receive it. I may want compensation for writing a novel that no one wants to read. Tough luck. I may want compensation for parenting. Again, tough luck. Having some rights to the fruits of one's labour is different from demanding fruits from that labour. I'm sure you would
Re:Open standards often are patented (Score:4, Insightful)
Getting back on topic. I think the following from the conclusion of the article says it all: "While Microsoft has granted patent use over the required portions of the specification that are described in detail the numerous undisclosed behaviours and inexplicit definitions are not covered, providing a legal as well as technical barrier to OOXML's implementation". I think we can quite easily arrive at the conclusion that to adopt OOXML is to adopt something that cannot easily be implemented by a third party, so we can assume this is a proprietary format that is dressed up to look like it is an open format.
Define reasonable. Define non-discriminatory. (Score:2)
If something is patented then the description of that patent should enable replication by any third party who then can legally produce and/or use that thing for a "Reasonable" and "Non-discriminatory" payment to the patent holder for the life of that patent. So basically all patents are open, however if the patent is vague or obvious then it should never have been granted in the first place.
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
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The distro includes the src, and part of the install process compiles it in the background. The user chooses wether they want to compile it or not, but the distro is only distributing src.
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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.
Focussing just on the money can easily make one miss the deeper problem with RAND terms. You'll find that some people now talk about RANDZ license terms, where the "Z" indicates "license fee is $0". But that doesn't necessarily make them any better. The license also has to allow sub-licensing without referral to the licensor. If it doesn't, open source implementations are effectively impossible since every developer and every user will need to independently obtain a license from the patent holder - an imp
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FYI:"Industry Standards" are patented (Score:2)
http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=273615&cid
Software Patents are Odious (Score:3, Interesting)
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 [slashdot.org].
OOXML would be an even bigger scandal because it does not even
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Open Standard means multi-partisan process, specification freely available and license-free. Patents are incompatible with open standards unless available under royalty-free terms (!= free of charge).
MPEG-4 is no open standard. And Open XML is no open standard. OpenDocument is.
Cmp. http://www.noooxml.org/what-is-an-open-standard [noooxml.org]
There can be only one (Score:4, Interesting)
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
Re:There can be only one (Score:4, Insightful)
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I googled, and found: http://redmonk.com/sogrady/2006/07/06/microsoft-o
Which says that MS themselves said that you cannot change the default 'save as'.
Why would they say that? (Score:4, Insightful)
Given that Sun's ODF plug-in [sun.com] 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.
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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.
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Thanks for the pointer, appreciated (for others looking, it's in this comment [msdn.com]). That's actually how the ODF plug-in achieves the addition to the format subsystem. It works as well as any of the other import/export capabilities that use this mechanism do (read: all of them). I struggle to understand why this level of interoperability hasn't been added directly to MS Office rather than Sun having to create a plug-in.
Extending the format system using this approach achieves the goal our team was trying to achi
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When your boss e-mails you ODF files, what are the chances that you won't have the upgraded software needed to read it? Bosses are dumb and will use whatever format the computer uses for them by default. However, the upgrade to MSO '07 will be a large expense for an IT staff to shoulder... and it is needed by everybody and not just the PHB.
Really, to defeat MOOXML, it is important to avoid the upgrade to MSO '07. The slow acceptable rate of Vista in businesses is a boon to this, because it takes away th
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Right.
Hey, these are what? ten, twelve years old?
A number of years indeed.
"Auto space like Word 95" (Score:5, Insightful)
'Nuff said.
The existence of shit like that in the spec -- not to mention the obsolete HTML export described in the post below yours [slashdot.org] -- 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. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
1900 is my personal favourite (Score:5, Interesting)
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?
Re:There can be only one (Score:4, Informative)
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? ;)
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Let me put this in as plain terms as possible: saving in a different format than the default one is what Joe User calls an "advanced feature", or sometimes simply "whut?" - unless a format is the default format in a certain program, hardly anyone will ever save documents in it.
People do not think about formats until they cannot open a file, and even then, understandably, they consider it all a nuisance.
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http://www.noooxml.org/petition [noooxml.org]
campaign?
Maybe OOXML standardisation is just a trick they play to prevent EU interoperability sanctions with a fake ISO standard?
Imagine OOXML gets an ISO standard instead of an ECMA standard. What is the effect?
1. Ecma standard --> ISO standard
2. ???
3. Profit
Will ISO standardisation really weaken ODf or help to build up a strong ODF advocacy movement?
Netscape 3? (Score:5, Informative)
and
Wow.Re: (Score:3, Funny)
The nice thing about standards (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft XML standard compliance would be just as useful as their POSIX compliance.
Five Letter Acronyms vs. Three Letter Acronyms (Score:3, Funny)
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: a word (as NATO, radar, or laser) formed from the initial letter or letters of each of the successive parts or major parts of a compound term; also : an abbreviation (as FBI) formed from initial letters : INITIALISM
So, why would you need to be able to pronounce the acronym as a word? The "also" seems to cover this nicely. "abbreviation" does not seem to cover it. You could call it "initialism" of course, but I think the rest of the cowboys here would not like it.
Misnomer: Open Standards are often patented .... (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
OOXML will never be a standard (Score:1, Flamebait)
OOXML could one day be called a standard, but it will never actually be one. Firstly, it's not a specification for a program to be written to, it's an after the fact description of MS hodge podge code.
At 6000+ pages, nobody will ever truly understand all of it. It's not humanly impossible, but who wants to make understanding a single 6000 page document their career? Consider, if you can read 100 pages with full comprehension per work day, it'll take over 3 months just to get through it.
With 6000+ pages
Why so few comments? (Score:2)
I feel uneasy about this, as It may be that as the voices of the informed fall silent, we will lose the battle to k
This doesn't make sense (Score:2)
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.