Advocating FDL University-courses

[Imran Ghory]

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
-- 
TheOpenCD Project
Promoting Open Source on Windows
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