Community Promise for XPS - FAQ

It was a simple, clear way, after looking at many different licensing approaches, to reassure a broad audience of developers and customers that the specification(s) could be used for free, easily, now and forever.

No one needs to sign anything or even reference anything. Anyone is free to implement the XPS specification(s) and do not need to make any mention of or reference to Microsoft. Anyone can use or implement the XPS specification with their technology, code, solution, etc. to be able to create, display and otherwise make use of XPS documents. You must agree to the terms in order to benefit from the promise; however, you do not need to sign a license agreement, or otherwise communicate your agreement to Microsoft.

The Community Promise for XPS applies to the XPS Specification located at http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/xps/downloads.mspx. The Community Promise for XPS covers anyone who is building software and or hardware that implements the XPS Specification for and those who sell or distribute such hardware and/or software as well as any use of such hardware and/or software. You can choose to implement only the mandatory required portion, or any of the optional elements up to an including all of the specification. The Community Promise for XPS does not apply to any part of your implementation that does not implement the XPS Specification.

We are providing access to all patent claims that would necessarily be infringed by implementation of the XPS Specification including patents that are necessary to implement required portions of both mandatory and optional parts of the XPS Specification.

The Community Promise for XPS applies whether you have a full or partial implementation, but only to the extent your implementation complies with the XPS Specification and only if you implement, at a minimum, all of the mandatory requirements of the XPS Specification.

The Community Promise for XPS applies to the version(s) of the XPS specification posted at http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/xps/downloads.mspx

It is a common practice that technology licenses focus on the specifics of what is described in detail in the specification and exclude what are frequently called “enabling technologies.” If we included patent claims to the enabling technology, then as an extreme example, it could be argued that one needs computer and operating system patents to implement almost any information technology specification. No such broad patent licenses to referenced technologies are ever given for specific industry standards.

There is no need for sublicensing. This promise is directly applicable to you and everyone else who wants to use it. Accordingly any other party, including your customers and vendors can directly take advantage of this same promise, and have the exact same protection that you have.

The Community Promise for XPS is a simple and clear way to assure that the broadest audience of developers and customers working with commercial or open source software can implement the XPS Specification for the purpose of reading writing and rendering XPS formatted documents. We leave it to those implementing these technologies to understand the legal environments in which they operate. This includes people operating in a GPL environment. Because the General Public License (GPL) is not interpreted the same way by everyone, we can’t give anyone a legal opinion about how our language relates to the GPL or other OSS licenses. However based on feedback from the open source community for similar documents, we believe that a broad audience of developers can implement the XPS Specification under the terms of this Promise.

The Community Promise for XPS is much more like the OSP than it is different. It differs in two ways. Most obvious is a provision that applies to printer and scanner manufacturers that is part of a previous licensing program offered to such users of the XPS Specification. The other is that this promise requires an implementer to support the minimum required set of functions described in the XPS Specifications as functions that must be supported. In order to assure that XPS documents will be able to be consistent from one implementation to another, a certain minimum set of functionality is required.

No. If you have entered into a license with Microsoft with respect to the XPS Specification and you wish to remain licensed under those terms, you may do so. If you wish to take advantage of the Promise instead of such a previous license you may do that as well. If you wish to enter into a license instead of this Promise now or in the future, please contact us and we will offer you a license under the same terms and conditions. It is our desire and intention to provide the terms and conditions of our Community Promise for XPS in a format that meets the needs of the as many members of the community as possible.