On 16 Jul 2002, at 17:19, Frank Heckenbach wrote:
- There is some patent owned by Microsoft regarding Office. I
think some description could be valable for Word format description. (did you remember the silly trick of Microsoft regarding the CIFS license ?) So we could have a restruction of using the description.
So far they haven't sued creators of any proprietary or Open Source program that uses .doc so even if it's true it's not for the format.
That fact that they haven't done so doesn't mean they couldn't in the future. I don't know if they have a patent that restricts independent implementations of the format, but if so, then the format is surely not transparent.
A patent would protect a technique, not a file format. (i.e like LZW compression, not the layout of the GIF file structure). An independent technique for generating the same would not be covered by the patent.
- The format is not described anywhere from a standard
place/organization (please provide an url, if you can found one).
I'm not WYSYWIG guy, why should I know such things.
Well, since you claimed: "IIRC .doc specification is available somewhere.", you might want to back up that claim ...
Instead of bothering to have the above arguement, you could have just fired up a webbrowser and spent a few seconds on google to turn up http://www.wvware.com/.
Imran