Microsoft has announced a ‘covenant not to sue’ which applies to the Office 2003 formats and will apply to the Office 2007 once the formats are finalized.
MICROSOFT’S COVENANT NOT TO SUE
Microsoft has always been torn between keeping their Office document formats exclusive to them (which keep people tied to Office) and making the formats more open (which encourages development, innovation and growth).
They taken a lot of flak for their licensing approach to XML based formats including the new default formats in Office 2007. In the past there were license requirements for any developer who wanted to support the Office XML format and those rules were in conflict with the popular open source license agreements.
So it’s nice to see that’s changed. Microsoft has announced a ‘covenant not to sue’ which applies to the Office 2003 formats and will apply to the Office 2007 once the formats are finalized.
This means there’s no paperwork. Microsoft says “No one needs to sign anything or even reference anything. Anyone is free to use the formats as they wish and do not need to make any mention or reference to Microsoft. Anyone can use or implement these formats to both read and write the formats with their technology, code, solution, etc. “
The company says that their changes will remove the primary objections to use of the Office document formats in GPL (General Public License) – but we’ll leave it to the lawyers to decide if all the obstacles are removed.
For more information – Microsoft’s FAQ
This means it’s more likely that other software providers like Corel and OpenOffice will be able to include the ability to read and write the upcoming Office 2007 document formats. While we have some concerns about the implementation of the docx, xlsx etc formats in the current beta of Office 2007, there’s a lot to like in the new document formats.
The difficulty with any new format is compatibility and that’s especially true with the widespread document formats used by Office. We hope that Microsoft’s covenant will help make the new formats more widely accepted.
The company is to be commended for making this change, it’s a reversal from the past policy.
But things aren’t looking that great for the Office legal team – the European Union has filed a complaint against Microsoft about their ‘desktop practices’ which means Office (read more).
