The Whole is Less than the Sum of the Parts

This is Rick Shaut’s take on the issues.

Went for a bit of mountain biking last night with Bob; actually, I nearly did not go. It was very wet during the day (torrential downpour in Paisley), and it was raining on and off when I got home from work, and I really could not have been bothered to go anywhere. But Bob phoned and talked me into it, and we had great time (and guess what, it did not rain!). Riding off road in the dark is such a fun! And there was plenty of mud around to add to the excitement — I had to borrow a dust sheet from Bob to put over my car seat for the drive home (mental note: next time do not wear white underpants). Read the rest »

Sun holds patent(s) for stuff connected with the OpenDocument, as it disclosed to OASIS:

OASIS has received the following statements or declarations regarding IPR related to the work of this technical committee:

Statement regarding IPR, submitted by Sun Microsystems, 11 December 2002

Sun Microsystems, Inc. (”Sun”) will offer a Royalty-Free License under its Essential Claims for the OpenOffice.org XML File Format Specification. One precondition of any such license granted to a party (”licensee”) shall be the licensee’s agreement to grant reciprocal Royalty-Free Licenses under its Essential Claims to Sun and other implementers of such specification. Sun expressly reserves all other rights it may have.

See the OASIS site.

I am surprised that I have not heard about this before, since this makes the OpenDocument fundamentaly unsuitable to be the default format for free software. Sun might be licensing it in terms of free beer, but is it free as speech?

This might not make any real difference to a lone hacker implementing the spec on his own, but it would make lot of difference for someone who is employed by a body that has IP claims of its own (no wonder M$ is not wanting to support OD).

I have done little bit more digging now, and here is the IPR policy under which the committee that designed the OD spec operated.

In particular, notice the disclaimer, which is included in the Appendix F of the OD specs:

OASIS takes no position regarding the validity or scope of any intellectual property or other rights that might be claimed to pertain to the implementation or use of the technology described in this document or the extent to which any license under such rights might or might not be available; neither does it represent that it has made any effort to identify any such rights. Information on OASIS’s procedures with respect to rights in OASIS specifications can be found at the OASIS website. Copies of claims of rights made available for publication and any assurances of licenses to be made available, or the result of an attempt made to obtain a general license or permission for the use of such proprietary rights by implementors or users of this specification, can be obtained from the OASIS Executive Director.

There are number of M$ folk blogging about O12, and some of it makes stimulating reading. The following are my picks on the UI:

Formatting: An Act In Three Plays

It’s All About Context

Some say that Mariner Write is a great product.

Do you know what is currently the greatest failure of all? Well, if in doubt, google. Note that the page contains only one sponsored link, which you should definitely read.

(And just to make sure that the results are not going to change any time soon, this is my contribution to Google’s search engine: miserable failure.)