Apparently, Microsoft is opening up it's XML for Office, calling it OpenXML. To me and a few others I know, that sounds like a Good Thing (TM). But this e-week article claims that OpenXML may not really be "Open":
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1892155,00.asp What confused me is this quote: "Even though it [OpenXML] is being submitted to a standards group, there is still a license attached," noted another independent software vendor, who asked not to be identified. "Why is that a key issue? Because the folks in the open-source camp can't use it. One of the restrictions of the license is that you can't distribute it freely or transfer ownership of the license." A few questions: 1) what is being licensed? The OpenXML format (DTD or schema)? The code to read it? Something else? 2) what is the "it" that I cannot distribute? A document in OpenXML? The DTD/schema? Something else? From what I understand about XML, I need two pieces of information in order to interpret an OpenXML document: the OpenXML document itself and the corresponding DTD or schema. If both of those are open, can I not write a program that converts the OpenXML document to something else, e.g. HTML or Open Document Format or whatever? Could I not then post that code on a website or on Sourceforge? As far as I can tell, the answer to both questions is "yes", which is good. So, why is there such skepticism in the press (e.g. slashdot, e-week, etc.)? In other words, would not the OpenXML standard be like the PDF standard? PDF is "open" and controlled by Adobe. Yet, there are any number of FLOSS tools that can read and write PDF, e.g. OpenOffice.org. Regards, - Robert http://www.cwelug.org/downloads Help others get OpenSource software. Distribute FLOSS for Windows, Linux, *BSD, and MacOS X with BitTorrent _______________________________________________ CWE-LUG mailing list [email protected] http://www.cwelug.org/ http://www.cwelug.org/archives/ http://www.cwelug.org/mailinglist/
