Open XML and ODF - What Do You Want To Encourage

re: Open XML and ODF - What Do You Want To Encourage

Luc Bolen — Fri, 29 Jun 2007 20:00:29 GMT

Jason,

If you need an example about how 2 standards for the same task is "inconsistant with the idea of promoting competition, innovation, and openness", have a look at the following story by David Berlind : "Tragedy: Commercial developer reports 35% of coding time spent on IE/FireFox incompatibilities"

http://blogs.zdnet.com/Berlind/?p=565

re: Open XML and ODF - What Do You Want To Encourage

Daniel — Sat, 30 Jun 2007 07:23:41 GMT

One of the biggest issues regarding OpenXML is patent encumbrance. Could you please go into detail regarding people's concerns about that? Thank you!

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re: Open XML and ODF - What Do You Want To Encourage

jasonmatusow — Mon, 02 Jul 2007 20:15:04 GMT

Daniel - there is absolutely NO issue around patents for Open XML.

Microsoft originally posted Open XML under a Covenant Not To Sue - and then amended that with the better Open Specification Promise. (http://www.microsoft.com/interop/osp)

What it all boils down to is an irrevocable, legally-binding promise that we will not sue anyone who builds an implementation of Open XML based upon the Microsoft patents necessary for that implementation.

Let me know if you want me to comment further.

thx

Jason

re: Open XML and ODF - What Do You Want To Encourage

jasonmatusow — Mon, 02 Jul 2007 21:28:21 GMT

Luc - I'm afraid I don't see the connection in your comment to what is happening in the world of ISO/IEC JTC-1 standardization. There are endless examples of incompatibilities that have arisen between commercial implementations of standardized technologies. That is the very nature of competition, and it is part of the idea that you want separation between the process of standardization (the agreement of multiple parties on technical specifications) vs. implementation (the actual building of the technology based on the spec - by anyone no matter if they were part of the standardization process or not).

Having multiple standards in a given technology space is not uncommon, nor has it been shown to dampen competition or to slow development. That is not to say that it has not been the cause of frustration or inneficiencies, but it is hard to argue that having similar standards has acted as a brake on innovation. The marketplace has a funny way of being far more important than the standards themselves. OSI vs. TCP/IP comes to mind.

In the document format arena there have been many standards (some market, some industry consortia, some international), yet that has not slowed innovation nor created a situation where if I have docs of one format on my machine, others won't open. Coexistence is possible, and competition/innovation continues to thrive within the applications that use the formats.

I think that openness of doc formats is a good trend - not just one format - but any doc format. Translation is the answer to the differences that exist between them.

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re: Open XML and ODF - What Do You Want To Encourage

Daniel — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 05:58:43 GMT

Hi Jason, I think a concern is that the more that MS's OOXMLtakes hold, the more likely MS is to claim that there are patent violations for various programs that process it and depend on it. I don't actually understand what the statement "builds an implementation of Open XML" means-- couldn't that mean anything you or I wanted it to mean? Doesn't Novell's version of OpenOffice.org now implement MSOOXML? Does that mean that everyone who contributes to OpenOffice.org is free from being sued, or being told that they are at risk of same, for their work?

re: Open XML and ODF - What Do You Want To Encourage

jasonmatusow — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 09:10:35 GMT

Thx for the comments Daniel -

I am not a lawyer, and if you have legal questions about the OSP, I'd recommend you ask one. (ah, disclaimers....)

As to what the scope of the promise is, the OSP states that it covers:

"making, using, selling, offering for sale, importing or distributing any implementation to the extent it conforms to a Covered Specification"

Keep in mind that legal text like the OSP, a license, or any such document will be limited to the spec itself. It is not good if the terms are overly broad in scope as things get very messy. I talk to many lawyers about this type of thing and it is always better to have things narrowly scoped so they are clear. In the case of the OSP - it covers:

"patents that are necessary to implement only the required portions of the Covered Specification that are described in detail and not merely referenced "

I understand what you are saying about the programs that process and depend on it. Yes, we do have patents on the features/functions/UI etc. of MS Office - but that is separate from the file format. The folks at Novell, or anywhere else for that matter may build a partial or complete implementation of Ecma Open XML and be covered by the OSP.

I am not being purposely thick - I konw that still leave open the question about the tools etc. you raise - but it is really important to keep things separate when you are talking about legal issues.

Our intent is to see broad adoption of OSP-covered specification. I think all of our actions and released over the past 12 months for interop should speak volumes about what we are doing.

Thanks

Jason

re: Open XML and ODF - What Do You Want To Encourage

Daniel — Wed, 04 Jul 2007 08:59:12 GMT

"It is really important to keep things separate when you are talking about legal issues."

I don't know if it is, though. I think Microsoft's intentions and likely future behavior in regard to the format should play a big role in the decisions governments and businesses make. MS might like to make the argument that OpenXML is just as open as ODF, but it would be much harder for any of Sun/IBM/KDE/Gnome/OpenOffice.org/Google/etc to pull a fast one with ODF (i.e., extending the format in ways that are then legally/technically incompatible) than it would be for Microsoft. This is because the main justification for use of OOXML is compatibility with MS products. (I venture that very few people would choose OOXML based on the merits of the format itself, except perhaps for some limited areas such as parts of the spreadsheet specs). Nobody will be coding their apps with the primary goal of being compliant with OOXML-- rather, they'll be coding to be compliant with MS's own implementations, which may or may not conform to OOXML, or may extend OOXML in legally or technically incompatible ways, as MS sees fit. While it might be possible for other companies to do something similar with ODF, I think it would be much, much harder and less likely that they would succeed. Given the histories of the players, I also think it would be much more likely for MS to try something anti-competitive through legal or technical maneuvering than it would be for Sun, Google, KDE, etc. In this vein, do you have any comments on Andy Updegrove's comments at http://consortiuminfo.org/standardsblog/article.php?story=20070702101415578

"I think all of our actions and released over the past 12 months for interop should speak volumes about what we are doing."

That's exactly what I'm worried about. "Interop" for Microsoft always seems to need some sort of legal catch-- it never seems like it's just interop for the sake of "rising-tide-raises-all-boats". In particular, I'm thinking of the recent issues with Microsoft's patent issues against Linux, as discussed in this article: http://www.microsoft-watch.com/content/corporate/the_reason_for_all_these_patent_deals.html

Do you have any thoughts on either my concerns or those raised in the Updegrove article? Particularly in regard to the potential and/or likelihood that Microsoft will eventually try to use proprietary extensions to limit patent-free interoperability?

re: Open XML and ODF - What Do You Want To Encourage

jasonmatusow — Thu, 05 Jul 2007 06:46:03 GMT

Daniel -

I can't speak to the future for any of these formats as, like everyone, I just don't know what direction things will take. I do know that we have committed to implementing Ecma Open XML in this and the next version of Office - so given our history of product releases, and our support policies, that means that we will have a supported version of the Ecma standard in a widely-used product until at least 2017. Ecma is the maintainer of the specification, and we are one vote of more than 20 in TC-45 which will do the maintenance work. If I am not mistaken, there are approximately 9 orgs voting on OASIS ODF working group at this point. They are both standards, they are both maintained by working groups, and both are subject to the realities of implementation when it comes to how customers will experience using them. If I am not mistaken, there has been much discussion over the fact that IBM's implementation of ODF for Workplace is not the same as what Sun and the OpenOffice community are doing for OpenOffice.

As for people coding to the Ecma Open XML spec - we are already seeing this happen. There is significant economic incentive for organizations looking to offer functionality that works with MS Office, or provides migration paths, or sucks data from Office apps into non-office productivity apps etc. I think this space is going to be very interesting, and all parties have the same motiviation for working with the spec with interop in mind.

I will comment with a top-level posting on Andy's comments. He is a really bright guy, and I need to make sure I am equally thoughtful in my response.

I also think your comments on our interop approach should get answered, but it is July 4, and I'm going to go play cribbage with my wife. :-)

Thx Daniel.

Jason

re: Open XML and ODF - What Do You Want To Encourage

JR — Sat, 07 Jul 2007 03:15:13 GMT

Why can't you just join to an existing standard? Why do you always have to mess around re-inventing the wheel? You already broke the internet and it's taken around 10 years to get to a point of stabilisation (imagine how the internet had been if there had only been one HTML standard to follow 10 years ago..), now you wanna break the opportunity of a perdurable, stable, archivable, file format?

re: Open XML and ODF - What Do You Want To Encourage

jasonmatusow — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 09:13:40 GMT

Hi JR - sorry it took so long to respond, I was on a camping trip with my family.

There are times and places where MS has joined existing standards efforts, and more times where we are the contributing party for a standard. There are of course many standards supported in our products where we were neither.

I have a hard time agreeing with you that anyone "broke" the Internet. My understanding of history (and goodness knows, I could be wrong on this one), that MS and other players were all building custom extensions to the standard in the innovation race that was under way at the time. I think you call out a really important dynamic about standards/standardization - the implementation is hugely important. It is one thing to make the statement that MS should have just adopted ODF and avoided this whole mess - and an entirely different one when you consider development costs, product release cycles, market competition of products, customer investment in features not represented in the standard, etc., etc., etc.

We have an open standard format. It is archivable (better technology for it too considering the native support of custom schema), it is stable, it is maintained by an independent group of interested parties, it is performant, it is full featured, it is backwards compatible, it is translateable...

We have zero interest in breaking ODF - just look at the record on the ANSI vote, our OASIS votes...

To the broader question of MS involvement in standards, and how we deal with this macro issue overall - that is one that takes more thinking and a long-term approach. I will blog more about this.

Thx again for the comment.

Jason

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