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The Microsoft Office Open XML is a primary file format to be used by the upcoming release of Microsoft Office (currently known as Office "12"). Microsoft claims that it will be an open standard, and has announced plans to submit it for ECMA standardization process. Microsoft also published "covenant not to sue" covering IP rights it has in the new format.

Other computer vendors have characterized it as an attempt to derail the Open Document Format (ODF), and have criticised Microsoft's standardization and other promises as falling short of what is needed to create a vendor-neutral open standard. In particlular, they have criticised the incompatibility of its licence terms with the GPL licence used by a large body of Free and Open-source software.

Microsoft's Open XML format is similar to ODF, in that both represent a ZIP container for XML and other data files. However, it has been criticised on a technical level by members of the ODF community for reflecting the internal data structures of the word processing application more closely than that of the document structure, and of not using the XML data model as cleanly as ODF.

External links

Microsoft documents and blog postings

• Microsoft Office Open XML Formats Overview
• Microsoft Office Open XML Formats Frequently Asked Questions
• Brian Jones: Office XML Formats
• Office "12" XML Schema Reference - PDC 2005 Preview

Other viewpoints

• ZDNet: Rosen approves Microsoft Office format license
• Groklaw: technical comparison of MS Open XML and ODF
• eWeek: Microsoft Drops the Office Open Standard Ball
• Sun - Peter Korn: Why won't Microsoft join existing standards efforts?
• eWeek: Microsoft's Standards Are No Standards at All

• Computing stubs
• XML-based standards
• Computer file formats