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List:       koffice-devel
Subject:    Re: MS filters
From:       Matthew Woehlke <mw_triad () users ! sourceforge ! net>
Date:       2008-03-14 16:34:30
Message-ID: fre9en$cv6$1 () ger ! gmane ! org
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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.

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