Microsoft announced last week that they are going to tweak their Office XML formats to be more like the Open Office ones: the main content will still be in XML, but the images and other media will simply be put in subdirectories, and the whole thing will be put into a standard .zip file, and then renamed to .docx or .xlsx or .pptx and so on.
Not only are they changing the XML formats, but they are going to make them the default this time around (that is: in Office 12, which is due out next year sometime). This wouldn’t actually be a big enough thing to make the news, except that Richard Stallman, the president of the Free Software Foundation, founder of the GNU movement, author of the General Pupblic License (GPL), and chief open source whiner, has bothered to point out that the license that Microsoft has been using for these XML formats is still not compatible with the GPL.
I’m going to tell you why that doesn’t matter.
Microsoft never claimed that their license was GPL compatible, and until now, the Free Software Foundation has not said that being GPL-compatible was required for a license to be considered “Free.” In fact, they maintain a huge list of GPL-incompatible licenses which they still consider to be free, including the Apache Software License, the Eclipse Public License, the Mozilla Public License, the PHP license and many more.
Supposedly, Microsoft is going to license their new formats under the same temrs as their Office 2003 XML formats … the Microsoft license for these XML formats is specifically limited to “those specific portions of a software product that read and write files that are fully compliant with the specifications for the Office Schemas.” And the entire license consists of one single requirement:
Microsoft hereby grants you a royalty-free license … to make, use, sell, offer to sell, import, and otherwise distribute … those specific portions of a software product that read and write files that are fully compliant with the specifications for the Office Schemas … conditioned upon you requiring that the following notice be prominently displayed in all copies and derivative works of your source code and in copies of the documentation and licenses associated with your Licensed Implementation:
This product may incorporate intellectual property owned by Microsoft Corporation. The terms and conditions upon which Microsoft is licensing such intellectual property may be found at http://msdn.microsoft.com /library /en-us /odcXMLRef /html /odcXMLRefLegalNotice.asp.
Stallman told eWEEK that “a program under this license does not permit modification,” but as you can clearly see if you read the license the license only applies to code that specifically reads and writes exactly these formats. If you’re not reading and writing these exact formats, then you don’t need a license anyway as your program doesn’t have anything to do with the Microsoft Office Open XML Formats… And certainly this license doesn’t affect any other portion of your program.
eWeek also quotes Stallman as stating that “the conditions imposed by the current license governing the use of the formats are ‘designed to prohibit all free software.’”
As usual, Stallman is grandstanding to get press coverage. According to his own statements: “The freedom to modify the software for private use, and the freedom to publish modified versions, are two of the essential components in the definition of free software.” Since you are in fact, free to write whatever programs you want, including ones which read and write these formats (as long as you include the intellectual property license terms statement), and you are free not only to distribute the source code, but to use and sell it … it seems to me that you do, in fact, have the two freedoms Stallman finds most important.
Of course you can change the code so it no longer reads the exact formats … then you wouldn’t even need to include the license statement, but you wouldn’t be compatible with the Microsoft Office documents either.
Honestly, I thought I was going to rant and rave in this post, but I can’t even find anything to get excited about. Certainly the terms of most of the OSI approved licenses are far more restrictive (in any sense of the word) than the ones imposed in this license, and quite frankly the Microsoft license here is virtually the same as the original BSD license, and the Free Software foundation’s main gripe about that is that it would cost more to advertise the software because you have to put so many credits on it that it becomes like a Scorcese film.
To sum up: the Microsoft license does, in fact, allow you and others to create and distribute “derivative works of your source code” as long as this advertising clause is in effect, and as such, it is a free software license. No matter how blindly Stallman may throw out statements about Microsoft, you needn’t buy into his assertions.
As a side note: I think that if a software library was created that allowed reading and writing the Microsoft “Open XML Formats,” that library could, in fact, be used from a GPL program without any problems, but if this is not the case, it is not the fault of the Microsoft license, but as usual, a problem with the extremely restrictive nature of the GPL that causes it to be “incompatible with so many other free licenses as well.”:http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/license-list.html#GPLIncompatibleLicenses
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It’s interesting that MS plans to release a version of Office that writes a sensible and simple file format, but given their past behaviour I’ll be surprised if it doesn’t do at least something in an unnecessarily complex fashion — like the way the Office suite saves bizarre and bloated HTML.