Hi Sander,
This is the official OASIS Press Release for OpenDocument. Articles are
starting to pop up all over, most of which borrow heavily from the OASIS
quotes.
I thought the comment from OASIS president Patrick Gannon was
exceptional. He fully credits OpenOffice.org, and reaches out to Open
Source Communities in the process. An important thing for him to do.
Since the release of the new OASIS IPR policy he has been frantically
treading water defending the royalty fee and patent encumbered
allowances of the new IPR against the rising global storm of angry
warnings coming from Open Standards and Open Source advocates.
The new OASIS IPR policy provides for three license models, only one of
which can be considered truly "Open", "Transparent" and "Unencumbered".
An Open Standards license used to be default for OASIS efforts, and
even though there were ways to introduce royalty and patent
encumbrances, the process was incredibly difficult, with many stages of
review and confirmation. Now "Open Standard" is just one of three
possible options, and it no longer is the default.
To make matters worse, the IPR goes further, allowing TC"s (technical
committees) to change from one license to another, at any time, through
a simple majority vote of the TC to change the Charter. It's entirely
possible for an OASIS Open Standard to have been in the marketplace for
ten years or more, and quietly have it's license model changed to allow
for patent and royalty restrictions. Under these conditions an OASIS
Open Standard is only open as long as the open standards advocates can
hold their majority on the TC.
Sad to say, but with the new OASIS IPR, the OASIS OpenDocument may be
the only open standards effort that is guaranteed to remain open -
thanks to some prescient foresight on the part of Sun lawyers when the
file format was first submitted to OASIS.
Still, it's nice to see Patrick Gannon recognizing the problem, and
using the occasion of the OpenDocument ratification to mend some fences.
~ge~
Sander Vesik wrote:
--- Gary Edwards <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
From: "Carol Geyer" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: Mon, 23 May 2005 09:35:37 -0400
Subject: [announce] Members Approve OpenDocument as OASIS Standard
Members Approve OpenDocument as OASIS Standard
WOOO!!! Cool :)
Sander
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