Fergie's Tech Blog

Microsoft Drops the Office Open Standard Ball

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols writes in eWeek:

Microsoft Corp.'s open-standard Office XML format announcement may have proved to be a dud.

When Microsoft announced a week ago Monday that it had decided to open up its Office 12 XML file formats and had submitted the formats to be considered as a formal open standard by ECMA International, Alan Yates, the general manager of Microsoft's Information Worker Strategy, said, "The new license that will accompany the Open XML format with the standards organization will go well beyond traditional standards licensing and will be very positive for the vast majority of developers, even open-source developers."

This new license was to have been released last Wednesday. Instead, all that Microsoft did was to release its Patent Protection Covenant for its Office XML formats.

posted by Fergie @ 11/29/2005 12:45:00 PM