Stephen McGibbon of MS points out, tactfully, (in a comment to an earlier article here) that I have not read the MS Open Specification Promise (OSP) carefully enough. At the end it has the words:
… this Promise also applies to the required elements of optional portions of such specifications.
So, just to be clear, let us […]
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 […]
Rob Weir has an interesting article about “optional” parts of OpenXML.
Here I want to deal with a rather different point from most of those that Rob is making, namely the bearing that this has on MS’s OSP.
In OpenXML and patents - Part 1 and Part 2, I discussed whether MS’s Open Specification Promise (OSP) was […]
1. A vote in the current letter ballot (ending Friday 31 August, unless you want to work weekends) has just two effects:
(A) it gives you a ticket to the Ballot Resolution Meeting (BRM);
(B) any comments (formally, “technical reasons”) you append to a No vote get pooled with other NB comments, and the comment pool essentially […]
In Part 1, we sketched out the background and identified two criticisms of MS’s Open Specification Promise (OSP). The first was that it does not cover future revisions of the standard.
There is obviously a difficulty about a covenant not to sue covering future changes, because no one knows what they might be. The general concept […]