Linked by Thom Holwerda on Fri 30th Sep 2005 11:15 UTC, submitted by Sansta
The commonwealth of Massachusetts has finalised its decision to standardise desktop applications on OpenDocument, a format not supported by Microsoft Office. State agencies in the executive branch are now supposed to migrate to OpenDocument-compliant applications by 1 January, 2007, a change that will affect about 50 000 desktop PCs. The reference model also confirms that Adobe's PDF format is considered an "open format".
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Member since:
2005-07-06
You haven't read the licenses. The licenses specifically cover the schemas, and it is not for read-only rights. The licenses specifically state that it is for building implimentations that read and write the formats.
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.
http://www.microsoft.com/mscorp/ip/format/xmlpatentlicense.asp
No reference implementation? MS Office is the reference implementation in as much as Acrobat/Adobe Reader were/are for PDF. Open/StarOffice supports the formats as well. There are other non-MS document process solutions around that also support the formats. The whole point of the licenses and providing reference schemas is to allow you to create conforming documents without needing a copy of MS Office. You use standard XML tools. You can use your onw solutions to do things such as dynamically creating or reusing documents/document elements without ever touching MS Office.
Even if you just want to use MS Office, you still don't need Office 12. Office 2003 reads/writes the current formats (again, so does OO/StarOffice). The Office 12 formats will be supported by MS for Office 2000, XP, 2003, and Office 12.