[Openstandaarden] MS Office en XML

[Dieter Van Uytvanck]

On Mon, Nov 17, 2003 at 10:32:51PM +0100, Jan Claeys wrote:

> Er staat ook: "You are not licensed to distribute a Licensed Implementation 
> under license terms and conditions that prohibit the terms and conditions 
> of this license.
> You are not licensed to sublicense or transfer your rights."
> 
> Ik ben niet echt zeker wat dat moet betekenen...

Ik raak er ondertussen ook niet echt meer uit, maar dit is wat op BXL
gepost is:

> Yes, it prevents programs redistribution if I read it well, as you are
> not allowed to sublicense the rights provided you.

I'm not sure that's correct. Sublicensing is something slightly
different to redistribution as I understand it: it's giving someone a
licence to something you don't really 'have'. As owners of the patents
involved, only Microsoft are able to licence rights to it, unless they
licence the right to someone else to sublicence it. Similarly, it's not
usually possible to sublicence the copyright to free software - you
receive your licence from the author (since they have the copyright), 
not the person who gave it to you, because the person who gave it to you
does not have rights to relicence the software (unless they're the
author ;). So, I don't think it prevents people distributing software
which implements the spec, whether they are the author of the software
or not.

However, I don't think the patent licence being issued is adequate for
free software. Although Microsoft are offering a non-discriminatory (as
far as I can see) royalty-free licence, it is only a licence to
implement the specification. It gives you no right to modify the
specification - although you could modify the schema, you would
(probably) still infringe the patent when you used that scheme, and you
wouldn't have a licence to do that. It's the usual RF proviso that the
patent licence doesn't apply to software not implementing a
specification; but probably even stricter.

Also notably, it also contains a patent litigation mutual destruction
clause similar to the one Apache are considering in ASL2 and that I
believe the FSF are considering for GPL3. But that appears to be the
only revocation clause.

Cheers,

Alex.
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