Talk:Proprietary format

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[edit] OOXML isn't open

The European Union says that patents related to an open standard must be made royalty-free, not just permitted for use within the standard.

Though the OOXML specification is publicly available, patents make improving it difficult, since Microsoft only permits the patents relevant to the specification to be used within the specification's definition. This means that it's hard for competitors to embrace, extend, and extinguish the patent but it also means that only Microsoft can improve the specification. Since modification of the specification is severely limited, it is not open by any definition of the word; at most it's on par with freeware software.

The above follows open source software, which has different prerequisites for openness than open standards, but OOXML is still a proprietary format. Though it has promised not to, Microsoft has made no legal assurance that it won't sue implementers for patent infringement. SteveSims (talk) 02:41, 28 November 2007 (UTC)

  1. The article open standard suggests that multiple definitions of open standard exist. The European Union is not (yet) the ruler of the world. :)
  2. Your statement "only Microsoft can improve the specification" is not correct. The specification is currently only maintained by Ecma International and ISO working groups. Microsoft announced that it will be an active participant in the future evolution of the Open XML standard.[1]
  3. Several standards organization agree that OOXML is an open standard:
Ghettoblaster (talk) 13:00, 31 May 2008 (UTC)
References
  1. ^ Microsoft Expands List of Formats Supported in Microsoft Office
  2. ^ ISO/IEC DIS 29500 receives necessary votes for approval as an International Standard. ISO (2008-04-02).
  3. ^ Presentation DIN NIA-34 Working Group ODF / Open XML Translation
  4. ^ "Office Open XML wird als weltweiter ISO/IEC-Standard anerkannt" (2008). ntz Fachzeitschrift für Informations- und Kommunikationstechnik (3-4): 10. Berlin: VDE-Verlag. ISSN 0948-728X. 

[edit] Plain Text

"note that 'plain text' may mean more than just ASCII"

If I understand correctly, not all plain text encodings are open (i.e. previous extensions to ASCII before UTF-8). This is probably why it was listed as "ASCII -- plain text" rather than "Plain text -- ASCII, UTF-8, etc. --Dbolton (talk) 03:46, 19 February 2008 (UTC)