Offering brings new levels of Transparency, Interoperability, Document Portability and ease of Communication, says Microsoft.
Microsoft Announces Free Office XML Reference Schemas
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
students using the student version will not have this ability. but it will be nice for OO and have full word compatibility in business….is Excel and Power Point next?
It should read “New levels of transparancy, …., to their own software”
OpenOffice shipped this long before Microsoft. Even Scribus is using XML. Well, everybody is storing files in XML, actually.
Now, they could not ask money for something that’s already on the market (Open Office file format).
But yet, Ballmer doesn’t think Linux and the Open Source world is innovating (see article last week).
It would be nice, but apparently MS are requiring that people effectively license a patent to use the schema. Moreover, the patent is non-transferable and the entire thing is designed in such a way as to prevent a GPL’d application using it.
iow, it’s utterly useless.
A solution could be an independent program that transforms between OO´s format and Microsoft´s format. That shouldn´t be too difficult.
right because if something can’t be used in some way with the GPL its useless, i’m sure all the commercial software house for windows will find it worthless, cause after all GPL stuff can’t use it.
Please
If this can’t be used with GPL stuff it ain’t going to make a bit of differance. Even if it could be used with GPL stuff, it wouldn’t change things. Do you somehow think Opensource people being able to get say the full word doc format and MS alowed it and it ment documents could be shared between office and things like OO.o it would make a bit of differance at all in OO.o taking off?
just because the patent it self is not transferable, you can still distribute a program that uses it. it is a free patent for license, that is no problem for GPLed software.
As far as I can tell from the patent license document, all you have to do to comply with the license is comply with the spec. As long as you don’t “embrace and extend” your import-export code to be incompatible with the MS specifications and include the patent notice in your license file and docs, there should be no problem. IANAL, so I couldn’t tell you whether that would be enough to be OK with the GPL without a disclaimer, but BSD stuff won’t be a problem.
This is similar to the Phillips (?) audio cassette patent license – as long as you conform to the standard, you can use the standard royaly-free.
Of course, they may have patents to office-app internals that might trip up competing applications, GPL or not. I wouldn’t be able to say about that, haven’t done a patent search.
(continued)
By the way, this does mean that if you wanted to use the MS formats as the native formats of your app, you would have to track the features of the MS apps pretty carefully, and not add anything incompatible that Word and such couldn’t read. I hope those formats are extensible in some graceful way, or you may be out of luck there.
The Pro version limitation of Word 2003 is only for the custom XML schemas support (being able to define a schema and then mark parts of the document as elements of that schema that you can then extract via XML). This WordML thing is different and all versions of Word 2003 can read and write it.
You can save any word document in word 2000 and word 2002 and export it to xml format for more than 2 years now.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dn…
You can also author xml docs with word 2002 by using visual basic .net.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dn…
sam: …for more than 2 years now.
True, but this makes that format publically documented. XML is a lot more useful if you know the schema, DTD, whatever.
The second link should be this one:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dn…
I don’t see FSF/GNU/RMS or GPL attached anywhere to this. Someone please explain to M$ what “FREE” means.
how the hell did Microsoft patent xml?
What has the GPL have to do with the price of fish in the Black sea during November?
If the schema hooked into OpenOffice, it would be valid, however, it is OpenOffice that is hooking into the schema, meaning the GPL license does not apply. It applies when the GPL software itself is hooked into, and even if it were the case, OpenOffice isn’t GPL but LGPL.
Brad, the post you are replying to is clearly a troll, but please, don’t use the deficencies of the english language as an excuse to mount an argument.
In pretty much every other language there are TWO distinct words to mean “free as in freedom” and “free as in beer”:
“libero”, “gratuito” in italian for example.
The FSF and the FLOSS world is simply using what is available in the english language. And by the way this is why many people try to use other words or terms, such as “libre software”, “open source” (I know, It’s not the same), and so on…
Bye, and have fun,
Renato