Do you love Microsoft?

I must have spent hundreds of hours in “drafting meetings” with high-powered (ie expensive) lawyers in investment bank meeting rooms. One thing I learnt was that such people tended to argue equally strongly for minutiae and for major deal-breaking points. Of course, that was correct. We were typically arguing about “prospectuses” and other public domain documents and it was important to get them right. Quite apart from legal issues, pride was also at stake. No one wanted a document to go out with a flaw, however minor.

I mention all that because of the word “only” in this critical extract from the MS OSP:

those claims … that are necessary to implement only the required portions of [OpenXML]

Why is “only” there? It certainly reads oddly. A clumsy writer might have used it thinking that it just reinforced “necessary”. But the OSP was clearly drafted by, or in conjunction with, lawyers, probably expensive lawyers, and they are careful with words.

Suppose OpenXML has a “required” feature X and another feature Y which is not “required”, and that a MS patent P is necessary to implement each of these two features. If you deleted the word “only”, then the OSP would cover P, because it was necessary for X, a required feature. But, as drafted, the OSP does not cover P, because it is not only necessary for X, but also for Y, which is not a required feature!

Either MS is devious, or its lawyers had an off-day. I am inclined to think the latter, but in any case we urgently need clarification from MS.