Microsoft Promises Not to Sue Over XPS Implementations

Published: February 14, 2007

by Alex Woodie

Microsoft really wants to unseat Adobe and its PDF format, the dominant document format used by millions of businesses and consumers around the world. The company even has come up with a competing document format, called XML Paper Specification (XPS), that it claims offers better fidelity than the PDF. Now, the software giant is looking to boost XPS' uptake in the open source ecosystem by promising not to sue anybody for using it.

On January 31, Microsoft published on its Web site a letter titled "Community Promise for XPS." In that note, Microsoft says it promises not to assert any claims against anybody for using, selling, importing, or distributing any implementation of the XPS format (as long as users conform to the XPS spec and aren't suing Microsoft). You can read the entire letter at http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/xps/xpscommunitypromise.mspx.

The company says it chose the community promise route to boost support for its product and eliminate users' risk of running afoul of Microsoft's XPS patents, instead of other common open source approaches such as the General Public License (GPL) because it is simpler and clearer. "Because the GPL is not interpreted the same way by everyone, we can't give anyone a legal opinion about how our language relates to the GPL or other OSS [open source software] licenses," the company says in an accompanying FAQ.

One could make the point that Microsoft should have used the Open Specification Promise (OSP), which it's using to distribute its Virtual Hard Disk (VHD) virtualization file format and other new technologies. However, the OSP apparently doesn't have enough teeth to prevent people from not following certain minimum technical guidelines for implementing XPS. "This promise requires an implementer to support the minimum required set of functions described in the XPS Specifications as functions that must be supported," Microsoft says in the FAQ. "In order to assure that XPS documents will be able to be consistent from one implementation to another, a certain minimum set of functionality is required."

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