Saem said:
I'm not talking about which licenses are free and to what degree. I'm saying that the competition MS would find is mainly in F/OSS and they're remaining closed to that. Of course they are, they'd have to innovate compete and work hard. As soon as netscape went out and until Mozilla started picking up steam IE went to completely crap.
I disagree with that. I don't think Office's main competition would (will) come from OSS as clearly bussinesses are scared of it and they want someone to offer support. It is proven that large companies don't adapt Linux, because they are scared of the GPL. This was a move that offered Sun (StarOffice) and Apple (iWork) what they've been waiting for a long time.
Then again, Microsoft can (will) have competition from OSS projects. Only not from GPL licensed ones (which is (I believe) the only OSI approved license incompatible with MS's format license).
Below is the license in question:
Patent License
Microsoft may have patents and/or patent applications that are necessary for you to license in order to make, sell, or distribute software programs that read or write files that comply with the Microsoft specifications for the Office Schemas.
Except as provided below, Microsoft hereby grants you a royalty-free license under Microsoft's Necessary Claims to make, use, sell, offer to sell, import, and otherwise distribute Licensed Implementations solely for the purpose of reading and writing files that comply with the Microsoft specifications for the Office Schemas. A "Licensed Implementation" means only those specific portions of a software product that read and write files that are fully compliant with the specifications for the Office Schemas. The term "Necessary Claims" means claims of a patent or patent application (including continuations, continuations-in-part, or reissues) that are owned or controlled by Microsoft and that are necessarily infringed by reading or writing files pursuant to the requirements of the Office Schemas. A claim is necessarily infringed only when it is not possible to avoid infringing when conforming to the specification. Notwithstanding the foregoing, "Necessary Claims" do not include any claims: (i) that would require a payment of royalties by Microsoft to unaffiliated third parties; (ii) covering any Enabling Technologies that may be necessary to make or use any product incorporating a Licensed Implementation, or (iii) covering the reading or writing of files other than those complying with the requirements of the specifications for the Office Schemas. "Enabling Technologies" means technologies that may be necessary to make or use any product or portion of a product that complies with the Microsoft specifications for the Office Schemas, but are not expressly set forth or required in those specifications, such as general word processing, spreadsheet or presentation features or functionality, operating system technology, programming interfaces, protocols, and the like.
If you distribute, license or sell a Licensed Implementation, this license is conditioned upon you requiring that the following notice be prominently displayed in all copies and derivative works of your source code and in copies of the documentation and licenses associated with your Licensed Implementation:
"This product may incorporate intellectual property owned by Microsoft Corporation. The terms and conditions upon which Microsoft is licensing such intellectual property may be found at http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/odcXMLRef/html/odcXMLRefLegalNotice.asp."
By including the above notice in a Licensed Implementation, you will be deemed to have accepted the terms and conditions of this license. You are not licensed to distribute a Licensed Implementation under license terms and conditions that prohibit the terms and conditions of this license.
You are not licensed to sublicense or transfer your rights.
By way of clarification of the foregoing, given the unique role of government institutions, end users will not violate this license by merely reading government documents that constitute files that comply with the Microsoft specifications for the Office Schemas, or by using (solely for the purpose of reading such files) any software that enables them to do so. The term "government documents" includes public records.
Microsoft reserves the right to terminate this license grant if you sue Microsoft or any of Microsoft's affiliates for patent infringement over claims relating to reading or writing of files that comply with the Office Schemas. This license is perpetual subject to this reservation.
You should consult applicable export control laws and regulations to determine whether they apply to your Licensed Implementation.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/d...en-us/odcXMLRef/html/odcXMLRefLegalNotice.asp
The old BSD license included a similar clause. Do you think that wasn't an OSS license? In fact there are many other OSI approved licenses with a similar clause and (you've guessed) are incompatible with the GPL. In fact, this is a good read -
http://www.apache.org/licenses/GPL-compatibility.html
I don't think this situation can be compared to EI vs *.* because MS was in no position of locking-in with IE. They were (are) with Office however. The recent Norwegian story comes to mind; for viewing government documents you were forced to use Office (and therefor Windows) and that's why that Norwegian guy freaked out. Now they can put up a link and say you can get a free program to view this documents here.
Also until now, I don't think there was much intuition for making a competitive Office suite, because no matter how good it would've been, no one would use it, because they have .doc files no one understands.
Unless one can freely translate between one representation to another for whatever data they might have they don't have control over their data. Since one can't freely do whatever they please with the information about the document formats that MS uses, one doesn't have control over their data and their data is hostage. This shouldn't be a difficulty concept. Open enough and so on doesn't work, because you're still restricted and thus not in control of your data.
You can already freely translate between .doc (a proprietary, closed format) to a free, open format - either MS's Office 2003 XML (or the new one) or PDF, RTF, HTML,... This is not a concept, because it's not real.
Read the license through; You can basically do anything you want with Office's XML files, granted that you include the above notice in a Licenced Implementation. Where a Licenced Implementation stands for: "A "Licensed Implementation" means only those specific portions of a software product that read and write files that are fully compliant with the specifications for the Office Schemas."
OO can probably still use a converter which would be licensed under a different license then GPL. I'm not 100% about this - maybe GPL also wants those parts of software GPL licensed. So, to answer your question: you _can_ freely translate, modify, create, read,... these formats if the software that does this is licensed under a license that allows that clause - this might even include LGPL.
I'm no GPL expert but if you think MS's license is "restrictive":
"c) If the modified program normally reads commands interactively when run, you must cause it, when started running for such interactive use in the most ordinary way, to print or display an announcement including an appropriate copyright notice and a notice that there is no warranty (or else, saying that you provide a warranty) and that users may redistribute the program under these conditions, and telling the user how to view a copy of this License. (Exception: if the Program itself is interactive but does not normally print such an announcement, your work based on the Program is not required to print an announcement.)"
That's from the GPL btw.
