Oliver Bell’s Weblog

The ODF Alliance have been very active during the process to standardize OpenXML, in the early days they did some good work highlighting parts of the specification that needed work.

Of late though they seem to have given up promoting ODF or contributing to the OpenXML debate in any constructive way and have instead chosen to generate paper after paper that I can only assume are aimed at trying to confuse the process as much as possible.

A clipping from their front page today clearly shows the weighting of their current agenda with only three out of the current seven “New and Noteworthy” articles having anything  to do with promoting ODF.

As an example, one of the recently issued a papers is titled “Developers Beware, OOXML – IPR: Minding the Gaps and Why They Matter”. There is nothing new in the document, just a regurgitation of comments that have been raised, addressed and closed many times.

In this paper, the ODF Alliance ignores the requirements of the ISO/IEC patent policy [and the statements made by the ISO/IEC Central Secretariats] and argues that there are gaps in the Open Specification Promise Microsoft has made available to implementers of Open XML that leaves them at risk.

In fact, the commitments that have been made go well beyond the requirements of ISO/IEC, and the “gaps” hinted at by the ODF Alliance are at best illusory, as demonstrated by the fact that many developers, including OSS developers, are already implementing Open XML without any IP barriers.

I thought it might be useful to look at some of the fiction in this document and and examine the three points that The ODF Alliance raise in detail so I spent a little time with Steve Mutkoski (part of the original team who authored the OSP) to add a little reality back into this debate… a brief response to the ODF Alliance paper follows;

1. Microsoft’s commitments go beyond what ISO/IEC requires.

ISO/IEC’s patent policy requires those involved in developing a specification that hold patents needed to implement the specification to declare whether they are willing to license those patents on reasonable and non-discriminatory (RAND) terms. Microsoft has submitted a Patent Declaration and Licensing Statement to ISO/IEC that goes beyond the required commitment to offer a RAND license in two respects. First, Microsoft has agreed to offer, to any implementer, a RAND license without a monetary royalty (a so-called RAND-Z license). Second, Microsoft also provides implementers with an option to rely on one of two different patent non-assertion promises – the Open Specification Promise and a Covenant Not-to-Sue – that are free and do not require implementers to sign a license agreement.

2. The OSP covers all parts the Open XML specification.

Contrary to the ODF Alliance’s paper, the OSP covers all parts of the Open XML specification. Like many standards bodies’ IPR policies and patent non-asserts, the OSP excludes basic enabling technology and referenced documents. These exclusions are customary, as Andy Updegrove has noted (see below). IPR licensing obligations in standards bodies almost always exclude so-called “enabling” technologies (such as the fact that one needs a computer to implement OpenXML) – for example, see Section 8.2 of the W3C’s patent policy.

Similarly, referenced documents do not form part of the specification, and those that are existing standards are already covered by their own patent declarations that provide access to the patent rights needed to implement them – for example, see Section 2.12 of the OASIS patent policy. As a further example, Open XML references the ISO standards for country codes and time/date formats. The ODF Alliance misconstrues the OSP by taking the phrase “described in detail” out of context, when the OSP juxtaposes it with the phrase “not merely referenced”.

Andy Updegrove on the OSP:

“With this as an introduction, let’s take a look at the new Microsoft promise, both on an absolute as well as comparative basis. Here’s what it says, and what I take it to mean:

* * * *

‘…that are described in detail and not merely referenced in such Specification….’

While not usually phrased in this fashion, this is a common limitation intended to clarify that, for example, other standards that may be referenced, or so-called “enabling technologies,” the use of which would be required to use an implementation (e.g., the computer upon which the software is running) are not included.”

3. The OSP covers both semantics and syntax

In connection with the national body comment process, the Open XML specification has been revised to include semantic as well as syntactic requirements (requiring that schemas not only be read or written but that the data represented by that schema be correctly understood and acted upon by a compliant application). Thus, by its terms, the OSP covers both semantic and syntactic requirements. Moreover, the OSP applies to any portion of an implementation that implements any portion of Open XML. Thus, developers who only implement parts of the specification (either by design or as a result of errors) are still covered.

4. The OSP covers patents held by Microsoft’s subsidiaries

As the ODF Alliance’s document recognizes, the OSP covers both patents directly owned by Microsoft and also those controlled by Microsoft. This includes patents covered by Microsoft subsidiaries, as they are under the control of their parent company.