"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."

My mate Sondre from CapGemini in Norway won their geek of the year. He was presented the award by a lovely lovely lady.

Check it out here: http://www.seher.no/php/art.php?id=513699

That Sondre grin is just naughty!

So we've been working on a great project over the past few months called TextGlow. It's the brainchild of James Newton-King and it's basically an Office Open XML file viewer written in Silverlight.

This means that you can view OOXML documents (default format in Office 2007) without having Office (or any other OOXML application) installed. Being Silverlight it works on Windows and Macintosh and we're also hoping to get it going on Moonlight- the Novell sponsored open source Silverlight implementation. Today at MIX08 and at another conference in Europe it was announced that SIlverlight will be avaialble on both Windows Mobile and several Nokia mobile phones. We'll be working hard to get it nailed for those too.

I don't want to steal James' thunder around how we built it but it would be remiss of me not to call out the team who have worked really hard on this project.

From our Intergen Interactive team, Nas Kahn made TextGlow look nice. When you look at it you'll see two things- a big white rectangle full of stuff that looks like it could only have come about from a '6000 word specification' and a really nice looking UI that wraps it up. Nas did the sexy stuff!

James did the stuff in the big white rectangle. Not as easy as it looks but mainly because Silverlight 2.0 is still pretty green and we had a few version changes and API changes over the past few months. James can provide the gory details.

Tony Yee (The world famous in Intergen Mr TY) Project Managed the team and worked hard to ensure that my propensity to feature creep any project I am let near didn't rub off on the team.

Katy Sweetman and Dan Ormond who have worked their tails off over the past few weeks helping me get the PR ready for launching at MIX.

So without further waffle from me.

Go Here To See TextGlow. A bit more press can bee seen over on the Intergen site here.

Feel free to take a look at the comments to the last post as this is a followup. You may want to ignore the snipey content devoid comments from our friend in the NZOSS community.

Herewith a follow up post that hopefully addresses the substantive questions that were actually raised (thanks Stu)

Sorry for the delay. I've been busy trying to get a high quality specification progressed through the ISO standards process. Oh and I've also managed to get outside to do some skiing in the Montana backcountry.

The issue is that the GPL aims to enforce the distribution of any derived work under the GPL also.

I do not want to release my applications under the GPL and inparticular I do not want to release any Open Source code I write under the GPL as I do not believe in the 'Copyleft' philosophy to which it subscribes.

Now that's fine. As a general rule I avoid GPL code like the plague (we do use LGPL code in some of our products). In fact our contracts at Kognition included a clause requireing neither party to the agreement to provide GPL code to the other.

So the question then comes to can I implement ODF without having to derive my work from any GPL based code.
My feeling is that even looking at the code for say OpenOffice will get me into trouble.
Likewise decompiling the code will be problematic.

I am actually comfortable reverse engineering by observation for features like 'blink', I do not believe that is going to breach copyright in the work.

But the question is, will reverse engineering by observation be sufficient. And to be honest I just don't know the answer to that question. I don't really see myself spending that much time working with ODF as I tend to agree with The Burton Report as to its likely levels of adoption and indeed the likely market segments to adopt it- selling software to people who are philosophically opposed to paying for software is unlikely to be a sustainable business. That said I did find a very interesting bit of commentary on the web about just this problem quite recently.

http://www.gnome.org/projects/gnumeric/announcements/1.8/gnumeric-1.8.shtml

"The Gnumeric team does not envision using the OpenDocument Format as its native format.

The spreadsheet part of ODF, in its current form, is ill defined and has many, many problems. For example: (1) there is no meaningful discussion of what functions a spreadsheet should support and what they should do. Without that, there is little point in trying to move a spreadsheet from one program to another; (2) there is no provision for sharing formulas between cells; (3) there is no implementation -- writing an ODF exporter consists of reverse-engineering OpenOffice to see what parts of the standard it can handle. (Note: the preceding comments relate to the spreadsheet part of ODF only; we do not have an informed opinion on ODF for word processing documents, for example.)

We may revisit this decision in the future, should the situation improve. In the meantime, we will strive to maintain a reasonable importer and exporter."

Those guys look to have actually broached the problem and to be honest that kinda answers my question. If I can't realisitically use ODF without reverse-engineering OpenOffice then I'm pretty much stuffed in terms of writing a GPL free implementation.

JB, Darryl and myself are doing a big road trip around New Zeaand in February showing off some of the great new bits that are shipping this year.

We're going to build and deploy a full blown application live on stage. And we're not talking about some basic console application here... this thing is going to be as mission ready as we can do in two hours! In particular it's going to be hosted across a pair of clustered virtual servers- it's basically the sort of setup that we'd be happy to pick up and drop into the Intergen Data Center.

Some of the things we'll be showing off...

• Live mapping
• AJAX Enabled WCF calls
• Virtualization with Windows Server 2008
• IIS7
• Powershell Scripting for data center and VM administration
• ADO.NET Entities
• Spatial Queries with SQL 2008
• Mirroring with SQL 2008

... and a whole lot of other cool things.

I don't want to give the game away yet and tell you what we're building, but, I'll give you a clue.....

You'll be able to keep an eye on where the three Amigos are going Mountain Biking and Whitewater Kayaking and Rafting and Skydiving and things as we make our way around the country.

Amazon have added a really cool new service that is paid for Video Downloads.... They have a really broad range of studios supporting this.