Archive for December, 2007
Back in March of 2006, I interviewed Alan Cote, the Supervisor of Public Records in the Public Records Division of the Massachusetts Secretary's office. Alan had testified back in October of 2005 in the hearing where Peter Quinn had been called on the carpet by Senator Marc Pacheco, the Chair of the Senate Committee on Post Audit and Oversight. At the Pacheco hearing, Alan had professed neutrality about ODF, but also doubts that document formats could provide a useful tool for document preservation.
What struck me most forcefully at both the hearing as well as the interview was that Alan presum...
One of the topics I'm behind writing on is the state of IPR concerns and standard setting in China in general, and the current status of UOF – China's "Uniform Office Document Format" entry in the document format sweepstakes – in particular. I recently spoke at two conferences in Beijing, and got back up to speed in this regard direct from the source. Here's an update (you can find background on UOF here and here).
While ODF and OOXML continue to generate news and heat, the progress of UOF has proceeded with much less fanfare and reportage. I gave a keynote presentation called the ...
The Protocol Freedom Information Foundation has just signed an agreement with Microsoft to receive the protocol documentation needed to fully interoperate with the Microsoft Windows workgroup server products and to make them available to Samba and other Free Software projects. Here's a podcast where Samba's Jeremy Allison explains the news to Don Marti of LinuxWorld.
No. This isn't a bit like the Novell-Microsoft agreements. This is for access to Microsoft's protocols, as ordered by the EU Commission and agreed to by Microsoft. It's a good thing, in my opinion, and the Samba guys worked really hard to make this as good as it gets. Note that it's a copyright agreement, with no per-copy royalties, not a patent licensing, but there's a list of patents. Samba has not agreed to license them. Rather it will avoid them, and with a list of them provided by Microsoft, they can and so can you. There is no acknowledgment of them by Samba, no money paid for them, nothing. This is what Novell and others could have done, and thanks to Samba, everyone is a bit freer today.
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