...the Office Open XML Formats — means customers and the industry are one step closer to preserved interoperability," Yates said in a statement.
In tandem with the creation of the Ecma committee, Microsoft revealed further details on the legal framework it has established around the Office Open XML formats.
In an FAQ, the company said it will grant royalty-free access to third parties that want to use the file formats and that it will not sue any other party for using patented Office technology.
In answer to a lingering question following the company's announced plans, Microsoft said its licensing scheme will allow for creation of open source products.
"Because the [open source] GPL is not universally interpreted the same way by everyone, we can't give anyone a legal opinion about how our language relates to the GPL or other OSS licences, but we believe we have removed the principal objections that people found with our prior licence in a very simple and clear way," the Microsoft FAQ stated.
Microsoft enlisted other companies to sponsor the Ecma proposal, including Apple, Barclays Capital, BP, the British Library, Essilor, Intel, NextPage, Statoil and Toshiba.
OpenDocument backers have resisted several aspects of the Ecma effort. For example, IBM voted against the creation of the Office Open XML committee on Thursday and HP abstained, according to an IBM representative.
"Questions raised previously about development, access and implementation remain unresolved today," an IBM representative said Thursday. He added that it is still unclear whether proprietary extensions to the standard will be permitted.
Andy Updegrove, partner at Boston law firm Gesmer Updegrove, called Microsoft's Ecma submission "a naked request to rubber stamp a vendor-specific solution". Updegrove is an attorney for OASIS, the standards body developing the OpenDocument standard, which was ratified in May.
The state of Massachusetts, by contrast, reacted positively to Microsoft's Office standard plan. If approved as a standard, Open Office XML could allow Microsoft to compete for contracts in state government agencies, according to a representative from the office of Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney.
Microsoft had been effectively shut out of the desktop software procurement process because it does not intend to support the OpenDocument format natively. Instead, it said it intends to rely on third-party products.
The Office Open XML committee at Ecma, meanwhile, has chosen to prioritise compatibility with existing Microsoft Office document formats.
"The benefit of backward compatibility that this effort will provide is evident from the broad spectrum of sponsors that will work together under the formal Ecma standardisation process," Ecma secretary general Jan van den Beld, said in a statement. A standard format will allow billions of existing Office documents to be converted with no loss of data or formatting, Ecma said.
As the technical committee prepares for its first meeting, expected later this month, Microsoft rivals and desktop software industry observers will be monitoring how open the process is to outside companies.
Gartner's Silver noted that it would be difficult for Microsoft to support the Office Open XML file formats in Office 12, which is due next year, if any substantial changes to the specification are made.
"It's fairly obvious that the specification that they have is very Microsoft Office-centric, whereas you would expect that something that they're trying to make open would be more generic," Silver said. "It's difficult to divorce the file format from the product."
Talkback
If this is any victory for Microsoft at all, it is not a clear one, and may wind up being Pyrrhic.
The label of "Standard" will not be bestowed for at least a year. OpenDocument has already received that distinction, and thus has a significant head start.
Further, there is no guarantee that Microsoft's format will be declared a standard at all. It does not conform to the spirt of standard, even if it somehow does meet the letter.
There are precisely zero implementations of Microsoft's proposed standard right now. Nor will MS Office 12 likely be ready in time a year from now, so there will still be zero. In contrast, OpenOffice 2, StarOffice 8, Abiword, TextMaker, and Writely support OpenDocument now, and Workplace, WordPerfect and many others will probably be ready within the year. There's no contest!
Finally, Massachusetts has already made their decision. If Microsoft's format is, by unlikely chance, declared a 'standard,' it won't matter. ODF has been selected by Mass, and there's little justification for switching to a different 'standard' that simply does the same thing! (Even if that were true and there were not subtle locks in whatever MS finally implements.)
Massachusetts' choice will (indeed, already has) opened the floodgates. ODF is going to gain ground, and rapidly, and everywhere in the world.
The best part is, everyone will benefit! Even those who don't see the advantages now and who strenuously argue to try to maintain the status quo (though it would change even if Microsoft maintained its hegemony). Massachusetts has chosen a tough, but extremely important, fight. And they'll prevail.
Now that it seems to be clear for some people that Office Open XML could be considered as a standard, "freely" and without the "risk to be sued"... when would we see a free (as in beer) software (opposed to OOo) that would process with this MS Stuff? How long must we wait until this product appears as mature as OOo? Does Massachussetts senator have an answer for his state's citizens about it? What is now the plan for MS after this production of deep smoke?
Let's see if we have this correctly.
We have OpenDocument, an open, public, published standard with absolutely no restrictive Nondisclosure agreements, and at least one implementation available as Open Source code. The cost, nominal to none, and it's available today.
We have Microsoft, a company known for ignoring even it's own so-called "standards" whenever it's convenient or might generate additional revenue, offering unspecified documentation, to a very small committee, for a product which, as a function of it's license agreements, can only be implemented by Microsoft, for Windows. And something, nobody knows exactly what, will be available by the end of 2006, before or after the release of Vista and long after the release and marketing push for Office 2005.
Microsoft isn't promising anything in terms of industry standard support, but expects corporations, government agencies, educational institutions, and nonprofit organizations to pony up tens of billions of dollars/euros on Windows 2005, instead of using their existing Office 2000 applications and "upgrading" in the form of software suites compliant with OpenDocument such as Open Office.
Open Office has been downloaded by over 100 million computers, and may have been cloned to many millions more.
But Microsoft wants governments and major corporations to cling to Microsoft's proprietary document formats for another 2-3 years until their "Open" XML document product becomes available in some future and unannounced version of Microsoft Office.
Wanna buy a bridge?