Compatibility With Open Source Licensing
The OSP is effectively a patent sublicense to everyone limited to use with certain formats and required technology to implement OSP licensed formats.
Open source licenses, in general, deal with licensing of copyrights of contributors to the software. GPLv2 is an example of such copyright licensing. GPLv2 does not grant you 3rd party (patent) rights.
The open source software (OSS) licensing deals with copyrights on the source code created by the contributors. Source code based on an OSP licenced format specification has its own copyrights and is therefore sublicensable by the contributors themselves. The OSP is only about patent rights. It grants additional rights to implementers and users to the OSS licensing.
Because Microsoft through the OSP grants patent rights to anybody that implements or uses technology required for OOXML there is no need for sublicensing of patent rights through the GPL. OSS users and implementers get the same rights automatically.
An OSS implementer that uses GPL software which implements an OSP licensed format, is granted certain copyrights on the software through his GPL license, which are granted by the prior software contributors. In addition to that he is allowed to use Microsoft patents for required format related technology through the OSP license.
Several standards and OSS licensing experts have expressed support of the OSP in 2006. An article in Cover Pages quotes Lawrence Rosen, an attorney and lecturer at Stanford Law School, as saying,
"I'm pleased that this OSP is compatible with free and open source licenses."
In 2006 Mark Webbink; a lawyer and member of the board of the Software Freedom Law Center, and former employee of Linux vendor Red Hat; said,
"Red Hat believes that the text of the OSP gives sufficient flexibility to implement the listed specifications in software licensed under free and open source licenses. We commend Microsoft’s efforts to reach out to representatives from the open source community and solicit their feedback on this text, and Microsoft's willingness to make modifications in response to our comments."
Standards lawyer Andy Updegrove said in 2006 the Open Specification Promise was
"what I consider to be a highly desirable tool for facilitating the implementation of open standards, in particular where those standards are of interest to the open source community."
Read more about this topic: Microsoft Open Specification Promise
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