Last week, Microsoft extended the terms of their Community Promise to implementations of the ECMA 334 and 335 standards. You might think this means it's safe to write your software in C#. However, this promise is full of loopholes, and it's nowhere near enough to make C# safe.

"I’ve just taken a first look at IBM’s promise not to assert its patents involved in implementing 150 software standards and it appears to be a work of art in its simplicity."

Nobody is buying it. Well. Employees, maybe. Microsoft is once again promising interoperability and adherence to standards, but its own version of each. Interoperability that is safe only for noncommercial software excludes Microsoft's number one competitor, Linux. It is noncommercial and commercial, depending on who is using it. So, right there it tells you that this is a promise to do nothing that matters.

I have some good news to announce: Microsoft will be applying the Community Promise to the ECMA 334 and ECMA 335 specs.

Microsoft has updated its Open Specification Promise page as of July 25, and it now says in the FAQ that the GPL is covered, including commercial:
Q: I am a developer/distributor/user of software that is licensed under the GPL, does the Open Specification Promise apply to me?

FSF: Last week, Microsoft extended the terms of their Community Promise to implementations of the ECMA 334 and 335 standards. You might think this means it's safe to write your software in C#. However, this promise is full of loopholes, and it's nowhere near enough to make C# safe.

There has been much discussion in the free software community and in the press about the inadequacy of Microsoft's Office Open XML (OOXML) as a standard, including good analysis of some of the shortcomings of Microsoft's Open Specification Promise (OSP), a promise that is supposed to protect projects from patent risk.

The open-source software community is up in arms over claims that IBM has broken a promise by asserting its patents against an open-source project. IBM denies that it has done so.

I have not seen any official document summarising the outcome of the OOXML seminar at UNSW last year. However, the main thing that I have heard unofficially in relation to the open specification promise is that pains were taken to compare its wording to the wording of similar promises made by IBM.