To me it was classic MSFT trick and so obvious and stupid that I expected everyone to jump on it right away. I failed to comment on it at the time because it was so obvious. Then I failed to comment because I started thinking that it is so obvious that I must be wrong about seeing what I saw there. Surely someone more experienced on legal issues than me would see it.

I mean it is absolutely in clear language in the OOXML IP commitment.

But now we have even SFLC analysis of the agreement which as far as I can see fails to see the most obvious trap. Either I am missing some legal detail or a lot of people seem to not actually read what is actually written.

MSFT IP (intellectual property in the widest sense of words i.e. patents, copyrights, trademarks etc.) guarantee states that they give ***NO rights to any of their IP*** that is not necessary to implement to minimal *mandatory* part of the standard. In particular, they give no rights to anyone just because a legacy formats are REFERRED in the standard.

The more stuff BRM moved to appendices or relegated to legacy status or optional parts of the standard, the happier MSFT was. Only they can ever implement the standard in full!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

No one else has any rights to even try to implement any of the functionality that is not spelled out in the mandatory parts of the standard in full. Note that any part that is not spelled out in detail is MSFT property and they agreement gives you no rights to even ask them how their various binary formats work or how MS workd 95 formats a list of items or whatever other thing that is defined by reference to how piece of software XXX works. The binary file formats are not essential part of the standard and even trying to reverse engineer them becomes even more illegal under many jurisdictions in Europe where many of MSFT most abusive behaviour was curtailed in small degree under certain protections w.r.t. rights to reverse engineer or reimplement things independently. Note that the legal status of MSFT binary format changes in each and every jurisdiction quite unpredictabibly if OOXML becomes law.

Of course MSFT could eliminate this obstacle to acceptance to OOXML by simply giving blanket license, right to sublicense and agreement not to sue anyone for any implemenetatons of the OOXML standard.

But then again, that would defeat their purpose of trying to make OOXML a standard….

Remember, all the law applies all the time and I actually see OOXML giving MSFT more protections in some jurisdictions within EU that they never had before!!!!!!

Am I really missing something or are legally minded people missing the big log in our common eye because of the forest of trivial detail?

(Signature FFAQ98)

They will gradually squeeze support for older binary formats out of Office altogether, basically because of two reasons:

1. It forces everyone to upgrade to a newer format, keeping the merry-go-round of implementing new formats for everyone else going.

2. It’s a convenient upgrade path. People feel compelled to re-save their documents and then that effectively cuts them off going back to other versions of Office and previous formats.

The net effect, really, is that many people are just sitting on Office 97, and Office 2000 and not choosing to upgrade anything. Interestingly, a lot of the integration that Microsoft espouses between Office and programming environments like Visual Basic is keeping them there. They simply have no time or resources to re-test and re-code all their macros and mail merge integration with a new version or Service Pack of Office.

Interesting. So why exactly are all of these Microsoft guys in Geneva that week? None of them appear to be BRM delegates. To quote Doug Mahugh, “Wow. If this isn’t an attempt to exert undue influence on the standards process, it’s hard to imagine what is. Who are these people?”

Methinks that the OFE conference has forced Microsoft’s lobbying team to decloak.

It has been alleged that ECMA 376 does not validate against the XML compliance tests; it has also proved difficult to translate ECMA 376 into a compliant XML standard such as ODF.

By the news on the Cover Pages website, every man and his dog is developing additional XML standards for document interchange. The Office Suite is no longer an island, existing in splendid isolation; for what it is worth, it has to interoperate with all the software producing and using standards such as the XML Localization Interchange File Format (XLIFF) v1.2.

If these standards take on momentum, and they each require a much higher standard of compliance with the base XML standard/s than ECMA 376 does, then using ECMA 376 is a neat and handy way to cripple your business, playing russian roulette with a loaded automatic instead of a revolver. Just think of all the interoperability you’ll be surrendering to your competition! Oh the joys of lock-in!

IBM never did anything formal to MS, and never anything informal either. Pointing out fact is not illegal, or sponsoring, or “anti-ooxml”. Misrepresenting the facts however , is both immoral and unethical. Not that Microsoft has ever done that recently or anything.

Which sessions do you think are “anti-ooxml”? I don’t see OOXML mentioned in any of the session descriptions. Microsoft claims that OOXML is an open standard. So why should they worry about sessions like “Standards and Intellectual Property Rights” or breakout sessions on “Standards in Education”?

In any case, there will be plenty of people attending the conference who are not BRM delegates. So I expect that the daytime sessions would not have BRM delegates in attendance, while the morning and evening sessions would be more likely to attract BRM participants.

Speaking for myself, my primary responsibility is to attend and participate in the BRM. But I will be very interested in the conference sessions and plan on attending as many as I can outside of the BRM hours.

And if I have time, I’ll blog it all.

What is interesting to me is that no one complained about Ecma TC45, which recently held a meeting in Kyoto, Japan at the same time as the SC34 Kyoto Plenary, and then invited SC34 members to attend the TC45 meeting in order to hear all sorts of wonderful things about OOXML.

IBM has members in the ISO national bodies. Wil they be attending the BRM for which they are in Geneva or will they attend the simultanious sessions organised by their own company ?

i don’t see the point on wasting precious time of NBs around the world reviewing this monster ( DIS 29500 ) ( i.e: 30 people at BSI expert group, USA/Incits V1, Japan, India, etc. ) if just any NB can join the party as P-member three days before and easily void your work casting a “yes without comments” vote.

There is no provision at ISO/IEC to avoid this un-ethic behaviour?

Doesn’t ISO/IEC JTC1 demand a minimum time ( a couple of months at least ) of participation in JTC1 activities to allow NB to cast votes in such importants standardization process ( like the fast-track of +6000 pages )?

Why the “old” NBs don’t put a formal complain at ISO about that? this kind of process must be challenged … standards are not games or a kind of election.

orlando