A leading open source legal advocacy group this week lashed out at Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) regarding what it calls uncertainty about the free use of the company’s specifications for its Office application suite file formats.
Microsoft, in turn, lashed right back.
On Wednesday, the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) issued a white paper criticizing Microsoft’s contribution, in particular, of its Office Open XML (OOXML) specification to what the software firm calls its “Open Specification Promise” (OSP) initiative.
Among the issues that the SFLC white paper raises are questions regarding whether Microsoft could draw open source developers into working with the OOXML formats and then withdraw them, or later versions, from OSP protection.
Begun in 2006, the OSP is the aegis under which Microsoft places certain specifications for use by developers with the promise that the company will not sue them for patent infringement. To date, Microsoft has contributed a range of specifications, including ones for Web services, virtualization, security, and Office file formats, to the OSP.
However, the SFLC’s white paper said that the OSP’s language is inexact or purposely fuzzy and could be read to be incompatible with the GNU General Public License (GPL), the standard software license for most open source projects.
“We publicly conclude that the OSP provides no assurance to GPL developers and that it is unsafe to rely upon the OSP for any free software implementation, whether under the GPL or another free software license,” the SFLC’s white paper states.
Gray Knowlton, group product manager for Microsoft Office, responded on his blog Thursday:
“This is an unfortunate report, these all represent issues that have been raised in a campaign that includes innuendo and supposition, leaving out inconvenient information and language and ignoring the same, similar, or less attractive, language that exists for ODF [OpenDocument Format],”
The OOXML file formats, which are the default file formats for Office 2007, have been highly controversial of late, especially among advocates of OOXML’s competition, ODF.
Knowlton argued that the SFLC’s assertions regarding OSP’s incompatibility with the GPL are incorrect.
“Not true. As far as we are concerned we are happy to extend the OSP to implementers who distribute their code under any copyright license including the GPL,” his post continued.
Microsoft has been pushing since December 2006 to get OOXML accepted as a standard for data interchange among productivity applications by the International Organization for Standardization. ODF is already an ISO document interchange standard, and its proponents argue strenuously that there is no need for a second.
Microsoft’s standards effort will culminate on March 29 when the deadline expires for ISO countries to change their votes on whether to make OOXML an ISO standard or not. One European standards group, (Ecma International), has already certified it as a standard. However, ISO approval is the gold standard, particularly when it comes to government purchasing requirements.
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In voting last summer, OOXML, which is now under Ecma’s guardianship, failed to receive enough votes to be certified by ISO. After a weeklong meeting at the end of February, the voting nations have 30 days to change their votes – or not. In fact, ISO certification could be worth billions to Microsoft and its partners.
Among the moves Microsoft has made to try to assure customers, partners and regulators alike is to place a number of specifications, including OOXML as well as the binary formats for earlier versions of Office, under the OSP.
An open source advocate
The SFLC was founded in February 2005 with initial funding from the Open Source Development Labs. Since that time, the law firm has become well known as an advocacy group for the open source movement.
However, that’s not the only major criticism leveled by the SFLC white paper.
“Microsoft makes its promise ‘irrevocably,’ but upon careful reading of the entire OSP, this promise is weakened considerably in the definition of Covered Specifications,” the group warns.
As proof, they point to language on Microsoft’s OSP site.
“New versions of previously covered specifications will be separately considered for addition to the list,” the OSP statement says.
To SFLC that’s a smoking gun that means that Microsoft could simply withdraw a specification from coverage or decide not to include a revision of one already under the promise. The result of such a move could undermine open source developers who had written code that uses a covered specification, because it could put them in violation of Microsoft’s patents, the white paper argues.
“For ODF, IBM (NYSE: IBM) in their ISP [Interoperability Specifications Pledge] takes the identical approach. Strange how things that seem appropriate for ODF are not appropriate for Open XML,” Knowlton countered.
However, the SFLC has a point, according to one analyst who covers Microsoft closely.
“They’ve never removed anything from OSP protection, but it hasn’t been around all that long,” Rob Helm, director of research at analysis firm Directions on Microsoft, told InternetNews.com.
His point is that open source developers’ fear is not without precedent – albeit, it goes back years. “Microsoft licensed information about the functioning of the NT 4.0 directory to a number of vendors, but did not license similar information for Windows 2000’s Active Directory,” Helm said. “The information that Microsoft chose not to license is what competitors have been trying to pry out of Microsoft in the EU antitrust case and the similar U.S. settlement agreement.”
“I think it’s a legitimate concern if building on a specification has some risks going forward,” he added.
