Re: [Fsfe-uk] OASIS standards to be RAND?

[Alex Hudson]

On Wed, 2005-02-23 at 09:18 +0000, Kevin Donnelly wrote:
> No doubt many of you will have seen the open letter criticising the fact that 
> many OASIS standards are becoming encumbered by "reasonable and 
> non-discriminatory" patent conditions.

Indeed :(

> Can anyone comment on how far will this affect the OpenOffice.org file 
> formats, which I believe are moving towards OASIS standards?

Well, it's not quite that - they've standardised their fileformat via
OASIS, so although it's an OASIS standard that doesn't mean the RAND
stuff would come into play. It's an OASIS standard, but for most
practical purposes it's not OASIS defining it, so there isn't a vendor
who would try to push in a patented method.

What it could mean is that if a proprietary vendor was able to get
changes to the standard in future which were covered by a patent, OOo
(and KOffice and the others) wouldn't be able to make use of them.
However, that would need a decision by the committee involved, which
isn't terribly likely to be honest. The current members are:

http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/membership.php?wg_abbrev=office

Of course, that doesn't mean that the standard might accidentally have
something which is covered by a patent, but that's outside the scope of
OASIS policy really.

Cheers,

Alex.