As I write this entry, hundreds of people from around the world are converging on Geneva, Switzerland. 120
will meet behind closed doors to hold the final collaborative
discussions that will determine whether OOXML will become an ISO/IEC
standard. When their work is complete, not everyone will
be pleased with the changes agreed upon, but all will acknowledge that
the specification that eventually emerges will be much improved from
the version that was originally submitted to Ecma two years ago.
Most will also agree that Microsoft’s customers and independent software vendors (ISVs) will be far better off with OOXML publicly available than they would if Microsoft had not offered the specification up at all.
To reach this final draft, hundreds of standards professionals in many nations have spent a great deal of time and effort, including many at Microsoft. And while Microsoft, working with Ecma, has not agreed to all of the changes that have been requested, my impression is that it has agreed to many that will, if implemented by Microsoft, require a substantial amount of work and technical compromise on its part.
Leaving
aside whether Microsoft has made sufficient concessions, it has also
made substantial accommodations on the intellectual property rights
(IPR) front along the way as well. Today, it makes
important IPR available under covenants not to sue that are more
broadly available, and far less burdensome than the licenses that it
required two years ago.
When I first
began to write about ODF in September of 2005, none of these
developments had been anticipated, much less promised by Microsoft. And
while the interoperability promises made by Microsoft as recently as
last week still fall short of those that would be required to meet the
needs of (for example) open source software developers, it is only fair
to acknowledge that there are other proprietary software vendors that
have not promised as much, and that the vast majority of
information and communications technology (ICT) standards are still
adopted under IPR policies that are primarily based upon RAND
declarations.
Read the complete essay by Andy Updegrove.
