Microsoft's Covenants, and the Velocity of Ideas

Related link: http://www.microsoft.com/office/xml/covenant.mspx

Common interchange formats allow synergy: you adopt them so
that instead of being tied to the capabilities of one application (or suite) you can shop around different applications and find the best value, capabilities and performance for each niche. Think of HTML editors. It is not too difficult to foresee that at some stage Microsoft will refactor its larger Office applications into smaller applications, notionally tied together by common document formats. Indeed, the new Office GUI revision is entirely predicated on the idea that they cannot sell any more products by adding more features, because users cannot find the existing ones. But festooning Word's GUI with ribbons and galleries can only get you so far: the fanout is still too great to support convenient access to thousands of functions.

In that respect, I think Tim Bray's recent call that Microsoft should adopt ODF with additions in whatever namespaces are necessary, is quite sensible. The whole issue of good markup languages for word processors is not new: indeed since the late 80s there has been a lot of experience in the merits of WP-centric dump formats versus "pure structure" formats. People interested should google for rainbow DTD for example.

I am not an ODF or O12F partisan. Microsoft is a big ship, so it is more reasonable to expect that they will find it easier to apply more power to go forward in whatever direction they decided to take a few years ago, than to demand them to react with agility. So let them "standardize" their document format through ECMA for what that is worth; the more that they publicly use the rhetoric of standards, the more that customers and developers will demand general adherance to real standards. But I don't see what they would lose by also supporting enriched ODF import and export too.

So what to make of the Microsoft Covenant Regarding Office 2003 XML Reference Schemas?

I always try and welcome anything warm and fuzzy! But I would like to have a few issues clarified, for us non-lawyers. First, what exactly is a convenant? Or, more particularly, which country or state's law of covenant is meant? (Washington State?) Is a chose in action being granted, and if so with whom or on what, and by which deed? Due to noxious US proactivism in its "free" trade negotiations, many countries recognize parts of US IPR law: do they also get the benefit of this covenant? Since IPR law is determined nation-by-nation, does a covenant made in Washington State cover someone in New Zealand, Canada, Spain, Nigeria, China or Japan?

Does international law need to catch up for when IPR owners want to give up these ill-gotten or star-crossed "rights"? Presumably this is also an issue for Sun, IBM and all the other large businesses who also see how much runaway IPR laws can impede their business.

More concretely, should every negotition between nations on accepting IPR monopolies also incorporate laws for when the owner of the right wishes to accede, covenant away or license away portions of their rights to the public, an increasingly common issue in this age of open source, open APIs and open standards?

In economics we have a theory called the velocity of money. A nation's prosperity is not only dependent on the amount of money, but how much it circulates: if you have the richest country in the world but can only spend money once every 25 years, you may as well be in a poor country. In software, the same principle applies: the "velocity of ideas". Software patents effectively reduce the velocity of ideas, since software is ideas. An impeded velocity of ideas hinders everyone.

Which word is sillier: festooning, fanout or industry standard?