[Tech] Microsoft intende brevettare il 'dialetto' XML di Office

La casa di Redmond ha presentato domande di brevetto sia in Nuova Zelanda che nell'Unione Europea.



Il brevetto dovrebbe coprire principalmente la modalità di salvataggio in formato XML dei file di Word, rendendo di fatto necessaria - per i concorrenti che volessero continuare a offrire funzionalità di import-export e in generale di interscambio e interoperabilità dei file fra i propri prodotti e Word - la stipula di un accordo di licenza e il pagamento delle relative royalties.

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.



Despite those moves toward openness, the patents could create a barrier to competing software, said 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," he said. "For example, if Corel wanted to improve WordPerfect's support of Word by adopting its XML format...for import/export, they'd probably have to license this patent."



The patents likely wouldn't immediately affect the open-source software package OpenOffice, which uses different XML techniques to describe a document, Helm said. But they could prevent future versions of OpenOffice and StarOffice, its proprietary sibling, from working with Microsoft's XML format.

Et voilà, siamo alle solite: benvenuti nella release 8.0 di Microsoft World Domination LSE (Legal Shit Edition).



Fonte: News.com.