From koffice-devel Fri Mar 14 16:34:30 2008 From: Matthew Woehlke Date: Fri, 14 Mar 2008 16:34:30 +0000 To: koffice-devel Subject: Re: MS filters Message-Id: X-MARC-Message: https://marc.info/?l=koffice-devel&m=120551252909943 Ariya Hidayat wrote: >> ...or on reverse engineering, which as I understand it is OK. Or at >> least, more OK than agreeing to a Microsoft license that would taint the >> sources ;-). > > For practical reasons, pure reverse engineering will be PITA. > > BTW, to add some more insights, Brian's response at > http://blogs.msdn.com/brian_jones/archive/2008/01/16/mapping-documents-in-the-binary-format-doc-xls-ppt-to-the-open-xml-format.aspx > is: Pardon me if I'm a bit more willing to trust SFLC than Microsoft ;-). Besides, did you read this comment by "Fuzzyeric"? http://blogs.msdn.com/brian_jones/archive/2008/01/16/mapping-documents-in-the-binary-format-doc-xls-ppt-to-the-open-xml-format.aspx#7145538 > "The whole point of the OSP (and IBM's ISP and Sun's patent statement > for ODF) is that they are not licenses, they are promises not to > assert patents in specific situations." Ok... my read on that is that OSP is meaningless; you're in the same boat as before where you *might* be infringing, and it sure looks like M$ reserves the right to sue except in very particular circumstances. Thus, it sounds like they just dumped a bunch of doc into the public, with no clear statement on what obligations, if any, you come under if you use those docs. I am not a lawyer. I still think I'd want to talk to one before touching that stuff (especially if the SFLC - whose opinion presumably *is* based on that of lawyers - is saying "don't"). At the very least, I recommend taking Thomas Zander's advice... keep KOffice and KDE in a clean room *away* from Microsoft's OSP. If you feel it necessary to read them, limit your work to the sourceforge libs, so that KDE/KOffice has some degree of insulation if (when?) Microsoft lets the other shoe drop. > Because they are unilateral promises, > there is nothing anyone has to do or agree to in order to benefit from > these promises. It only applies to "any implementation *to the extent it conforms to a Covered Specification*". That doesn't sound very unilateral to me. Unilateral would be a promise by Microsoft not to assert any claims (patent or otherwise) against anyone benefiting, directly or indirectly, from the documentation, regardless of what their code does (the non-retaliatory clause is probably OK). *That* might be GPL-ok. -- Matthew Somewhere, there is a .sig so funny that reading it will cause an aneurysm. I haven't found it yet, but I think I met a few of the runners-up. _______________________________________________ koffice-devel mailing list koffice-devel@kde.org https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/koffice-devel