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 Thursday, March 13, 2008
Who Is Telling Porkies?
The Software Freedom Law Center have posted a Resource on the Microsoft Open Specificaton Promise.
It states, among other things:
"There has been much discussion in the free software community and in
the press about the inadequacy of Microsoft's Office Open XML (OOXML)
as a standard, including good analysis of some of the shortcomings of
Microsoft's Open Specification Promise (OSP), a promise that is
supposed to protect projects from patent risk. Nonetheless, following the
close of the ISO-BRM meeting in Geneva, SFLC's clients and colleagues
have continued to express uncertainty as to whether the OSP would
adequately apply to implementations licensed under the GNU General
Public License (GPL). In response to these requests for
clarification, 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."
Lawrence Rosen says it's compatible with free and open source licenses. So do number of other prominent OSS legal minds.
The
OSP has actually been around for a decent length of time. For those who
aren't aware it's the approach taken to cover the IPR in relation to
the Web Services specifications work MSFT is involved in with OASIS
(Yes OASIS as in manages ODF). So for example Apache has implemented
SOAP- released under the Apace open source license. THe guys from Sugar CRM have also succesfully released their SOAP based web services under GPL v3.
So either Rosen is wrong and Apache/SugarCRM are risking IP breach, or, someone is telling porkies.
Maybe Larry and Larry (Lessig, one of the Directors of the SFLC) could get together for a bit of a chat (the are former collegues @ Stanford Law) and work out who is right, or who is wrong, or why we seem to have two TOTALLY disparate answers out there?
PoliTechLaw|Thursday, March 13, 2008 4:56:00 AM UTC||
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