Silverlight viewer for Open XML

re: Silverlight viewer for Open XML

Gareth Horton — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 20:44:57 GMT

Gray,

The whole argument around IP issues with 3rd party implementations is really rather odd. It reminds of of Rene Magritte (picture of an apple with the caption 'this is not an apple').

We released the latest Monarch product back in February 2007 with Open XML spreadsheet support. Furthermore we have been creating Excel exports based on the far more amorphous licensing issues for the legacy file formats for many, many years with no fear of recriminations, as had thousands of other ISVs.

Ours is not a product that just a few users will ever see, we have a user base of nearly 500,000 (although obviously a smaller number on the latest version that contains Open XML), including many of the largest organizations worldwide, so the impact of an IP issue with our software would be devastating.

Although the EULA means we indemnify customers against such claims, any issues of this nature would be be financially catastrophic.

We saw no reason for this to be a legal risk, and as a public company it is obviously something that has to be taken seriously.

Following the raft of announcements of late, it is even more unthinkable both from a legal and a PR perspective that any IP issues can exist around Open XML implementations.

I suppose I could ask you outright:

"Gray, is Microsoft going to sue Datawatch now, or in the foreseeable future, on the specific issue of implementing Open XML support in our product"

Gareth

re: Silverlight viewer for Open XML

Gray Knowlton — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 22:38:28 GMT

Hi Gareth,

Interesting question... It sounds like your company reviewed the OSP and determined that it met your needs in terms of being able to implement Open XML? As I read the OSP, unless your company decides to bring a lawsuit against Microsoft’s implementation of Open XML, your company should not be concerned about Microsoft bringing a lawsuit against Datawatch regarding any patents required to implement the standard. My take on it (see above comments about not being an attorney) is that this is exactly what the OSP is designed to provide.

And I'd guess you also have an opinion about your comfort level from implementing the binary formats in the past?

re: Silverlight viewer for Open XML

Gareth Horton — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 23:11:31 GMT

Gray,

That's correct.

As regards the binary formats, Microsoft Press did produce a book for the Excel binary file format some time ago.

This, added to the fact that thousands of other developers, including all the competing office suites implemented Excel read and write using the file formats themselves, rather than just using Jet/DAO/OLE DB or other Microsoft-provided high-level APIs gave us the comfort level we needed.

This includes the open source office suites too. Furthermore, OpenOffice published documentation resulting from their reverse-engineering of the binary Excel format (amongst others) publicly without any action from Microsoft. This documentation was originally started by Sun, according to the documentation itself, but I don't know if they ever published it publicly themselves.

Seems like they weren't sweating about it.

IP issues didn't keep me up at night, just the usual, mundane things like bugs.

Gareth

re: Silverlight viewer for Open XML

someone — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 01:02:05 GMT

Hey on my older comp, I use Office XP on Windows Me. Now I *know* that Windows Me support has ended, but can't MS make available an unsupported version of the compatibility pack that works on Windows 98 SE and Me? My temporary solution so far is installing Novell OpenOffice which can save files as OOXML but users of older versions of Office (as old as Office 2000) are also likely to run older Windows versions, can't MS please release a compatibility pack for 9x? I really want to save from Office XP as OOXML.

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