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 […]
What happens if one vendor has Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) relating to a draft standard? How does that impact on the standards process? Should a standard be approved if compliance would require a licence from the vendor?
In the case of ISO/IEC there is an agreed Common Patent Policy which requires that the patent holder of […]
The short answer is that it has not voted yet and the decision on how it will vote has not yet been made.
The proceedings of BSI committees are confidential. Since I was a member of the ad hoc technical committee on OpenXML, and was allowed to attend the meetings of that committee and (as an […]