M$ @ it again!!!

[Sean Wheller <seanwhe -at- yahoo -dot- com>]

Trust M$ to take something open and free an make a
hash of it. Taken from XML.org [http://www.xml.org]

Microsoft Seeks XML-Related Patents
 David Becker, CNET News.com
 Microsoft has applied for patents that could prevent
competing applications from reading documents created
with the latest version of the software giant's Office
program. The company filed similar patent applications
in New Zealand and the European Union that cover word
processing documents stored in the XML (Extensible
Markup Language) format. The proposed patent would
cover methods for an application other than the
original word processor to access data in the
document. The proposed patents apparently seek to
protect methods other applications could use to
interpret the XML dialect, or schema, Office uses to
describe and organize information in documents.
Microsoft recently agreed to publish those schemas and
is looking at opening other chunks of Office code.
According to Rob Helm, an analyst for research firm
Directions on Microsoft: "This is a direct challenge
to software vendors who want to interoperate with Word
through XML... The patents likely wouldn't immediately
affect the open-source software package OpenOffice,
which uses different XML techniques to describe a
document, but they could prevent future versions of
OpenOffice and StarOffice, its proprietary sibling,
from working with Microsoft's XML format.

--
Sean Wheller

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