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  1. Comment - Sun's McNealy Proposes Merging ODF with Chinese Counterpart

    (Apr 23, 2007 - 3:09 PM)

    Royalties? The last paragraph implies that the UOF format could collect royalties from its users. That's exactly the opposite of what ODF has been fighting for: a patent- and royalty-free format that anyone can implement in open and closed source applications without having to pay or ask for prior permission.

    If UOF requires royalties, then it would make no sense to converge ODF with it, and thus lose ODF's greatest non-technical reason for existence. And indeed, if UOF requires royalties, than it offers little to no advantage over Microsoft's file formats either.

    Is this paragraph incorrect? I cannot imagine Sun would consider merging ODF with a format requiring royalties.

    While on the other hand, since ODF does not require royalties, I don't understand why it is not acceptable as a national standard in China. From what I've read elsewhere, UOF was based on the same original OpenOffice.org file format design that later morphed into ODF anyway. Is China suffering from "not invented here" syndrome in this case?