M$ SA software patent challenged

29 June 2005

South African free software advocates yesterday served patent "request to surrender" papers on Microsoft SA's legal representatives, urging the company to withdraw a patent (ZA200303346) it holds on XML-based word processing. The patent, titled "Word processing document stored in a single XML file that may be manipulated by applications that understand XML", suggests that the software giant invented and owns the process of XML-based word processing.

http://www.tectonic.co.za/view.php?id=497

...good to know that someone is keeping an eye on this - software patents are not allowed in SA

hell yeah!
If that patent went through I'd have to lose KOffice/OO... not very likely might I add.
Darn M$, think they own everything, another shining example of a monopoly hard at work...

Good news, is there an online service for SA patents - where one can look stuff up & whatnot?

While this has become an issue, can somebody explain to me the underlying difference between storing a doc in XML and the earliest word processors that required one to actually insert formatting code as one went along?

I used to work on Sharp MZ80B machines many years ago, and remember using such a word processor for creating advance research reports!

kaspaas said:

While this has become an issue, can somebody explain to me the underlying difference between storing a doc in XML and the earliest word processors that required one to actually insert formatting code as one went along?

...

Click to expand...

.doc files and other proprietary data file types require a lot of hardcoding in applications - code that is specific to a particular data format - compared to the fexibility of xml, proprietary data interchange is basically not worth the effort [anymore]...

xml is a data language and interchange standard, so any application that understands xml, can "read" xml encoded data, however there are an infinite number a xml "dialects" - as many as people care to dream up, so while an application can read xml encoded data, the application will only "understand" the data if it understands the dialect...basically xml is the Rosetta Stone of Data Interchange...also there are ways of automatically converting/translating between dialects e.g. xslt, xsl:fo...this allows an application to transparently manipulate xml data without needing to understand the original dialect...

the way microsoft is doing it, is to store formatting data and content in an xml file, then include that file plus any embeded stuff in a zip file and give it a fancy extension. OpenOffice has always done it this way