Re: [Planner Dev] M$ Orifice Open XML formats

[Kurt Maute <kurt maute us>]

On Wed, 2005-06-22 at 22:29 -0400, Francisco Moraes wrote:
> Kurt Maute wrote:
> 
> >Was wondering if anyone else has noticed the recent announcement from
> >Microsoft - that they'll be converting their standard M$ Orifice
> >document formats to a royalty free open xml format.  Linkage:
> >http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview/default.mspx
> I thought there were some questions whether their proposed license would 
> be compatible with GPL.

Its an interesting question - and though I'm not a lawyer I don't think
this would turn out to be all that big an issue.  OpenOffice and others
have been shipping with MS file import/export features for years and
they've never been sued, and those are AFAIK wholly proprietary formats.
I think that making the new format royalty free just makes it more
official.

If it comes down to it, though, the import/export features could be
built as plugins and assigned a different license.

-- 
Kurt Maute <kurt maute us>