Microsoft Open Specification Promise

The Microsoft Open Specification Promise (or OSP), is a promise by Microsoft, published in September 2006, to not assert its patents, in certain conditions, against implementations of a certain list of specifications.

The OSP is not a licence, but rather a Covenant Not to Sue. It promises protection but doesn't grant any rights.

The OSP is limited to implementations to the extent that they conform to those specifications. This allows for conformance to be partial. So if an implementation follows the specification for some aspects, and deviates in other aspects, then the Convent Not to Sue applies only to the implementation's aspects which follow the specification.

The protections granted by the OSP are independent to the licence of implementations. There is disagreement as to whether the conditions of the OSP can be fulfilled by free software / open source projects, and whether they thus gain any protection from the OSP.

An article in Cover Pages quotes Lawrence Rosen, an attorney and lecturer at Stanford Law School, as saying,

"I'm pleased that this OSP is compatible with free and open source licenses."

GNU/Linux vendor Red Hat's stance, as communicated by lawyer Mark Webbink in 2006, is:

"Red Hat believes that the text of the OSP gives sufficient flexibility to implement the listed specifications in software licensed under free and open source licenses. We commend Microsoft’s efforts to reach out to representatives from the open source community and solicit their feedback on this text, and Microsoft's willingness to make modifications in response to our comments."

Standards lawyer Andy Updegrove said in 2006 the Open Specification Promise was

"what I consider to be a highly desirable tool for facilitating the implementation of open standards, in particular where those standards are of interest to the open source community."

However, the Software Freedom Law Center, a law firm for free software and open source software, has warned of problems with the OSP for use in free software / open source software projects. In a published analysis of the promise it states that

"...it permits implementation under free software licenses so long as the resulting code isn't used freely."

Their analysis warned of a possible inconsistency with GPL. This applies specifically to the patent promise scope being limited to conforming implementations of covered specifications only.

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Wikipedia