Microsoft commits to XML docs for long term

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Microsoft is opening this to meet EU req's.

What is going on (and I would suggest reading both http://www.openoffice.org/license.html and http://www.microsoft.com/office/xml/juneletter.mspx) is publishing a XML Schema to meet European Union's (EU) Interchange of Data between Administrations (IDA) Commission. From: http://www.microsoft.com/office/xml/juneletter.mspx

Although our work will certainly continue, we view the EU report as a validation of our investment in XML and our open, royalty-free approach. Microsoft announced the availability of the WordprocessingML format (also known as WordML) through a royalty-free licensing program shortly after the launch of the Microsoft Office System last October. Since that time, we have seen a tremendous response to this announcement from governments and from a broad set of customers that have accelerated plans for deployment of XML-based solutions based on the Microsoft Office 2003 Editions. We were honored and pleased to be invited by the EU to a meeting of the IDA earlier this year to discuss our work and the steps we have taken to develop an open document format.

I appreciate the Commission's drive to encourage the industry to provide filters that allow documents based on the WordML specifications to be read and written to other applications while maintaining a maximum degree of accuracy in content, structure and presentation. At Microsoft, we fully believe in the benefits of this, as demonstrated by our licensing program for the open and royalty-free Office 2003 XML Reference Schemas. This program specifically enables the developer community to build such filters to enable better interoperability across document formats. If it is not too bold, I would actually like to expand this call to action. We should not be limiting our thinking to word processing capabilities; I would like to see this concept extended to many more productivity-based scenarios that will bring data interoperability efficiencies to customers worldwide. This is the core foundation of the release of SpreadsheetML (for Microsoft Office Excel 2003), DataDiagramingML (for Microsoft Office Visio? 2003), WordprocessingML (for Microsoft Office Word 2003) and FormTemplate Schemas (for Microsoft Office InfoPath? 2003).

OpenOffice, a product owned by Sun Microsystems, provides for 4 licenses:

* Public Document License (PDL)
* GNU General Public License (GPL)
* GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL)
* Sun Industry Standards Source License (SISSL)

There is nothing that states that the Schema or a parser has to be GPL, BSD, SISSL, Microsoft, etc.

Posted by: B.O.F.H.   Posted on: 11/06/04 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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