[Openstandaarden] Moglen over Ms Office XML

[Wouter Vanden Hove]

FSF eases Microsoft schema patent fears
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/34045.html

Moglen says that Microsoft's schema license conforms to the compromise
that he worked out with community leader Bruce Perens when revising the
World Wide Web Consortium's (W3C) proposed RAND license. Two years ago
the W3C proposed to allow, in parallel to the web's tradition of
royalty-free licenses which saw a developers revolt.

...
Iyer Venkatesan, product manager for StarOffice at Sun Microsystems,
generally welcomed Microsoft's move to publish the schema but sounded a
note of caution. "We're probably going to see how the lawyers look at
it," he told us. "It's possible a GPL program would not be able to read
Office 2003 files but BSD would be able to read it. But we have to
figure that out."

...
Moglen says that this doesn't prevent a free software programmer
creating derivative works, because the schema is being licensed from
Microsoft. 

"Section 7 of the GPL says if you're restricted by a judgement or a
license you've accepted, and they're incompatible, then you can't
distribute your software under GPL. But it's not the case that this
license violates Section 7." 

"I want to reassure people that it's not an issue". ®
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