Over at the Cnet News Blog, Martin LaMonica reports on recent Software Freedom Legal Center (SFLC) analysis of terms covering Microsoft's Open XML format. The Open XML format is up for final approval at the International Organization for Standardization this week. Microsoft competitors have been critical of the file format, and the SFLC shows no exception.

Having followed technology policy for a number of years, from within the West Coast software sector, and then in the think tank community of Washington DC, I've grown accustomed to the fact that industry entities compete on policy positions as they do in product-service markets. It still baffles me, however, the positions of FOSS entities such as the SFLC, that aim to weaken practices that do not support their own. The issue is rarely whether or not others conflict with the FOSS Movement, rather, the FOSS community shows agitation whenever others do not support its ideals. The result is the perspective that others' gain is the FOSS Movement's loss.

For example, the SFLC took issue with Microsoft's Open Specification Promise (OSP).

The OSP cannot be relied upon by GPL developers for their implementations not because its provisions conflict with GPL, but because it does not provide the freedom that the GPL requires... GPL developers, with their special sensitivity to issues of preserving downstream freedom, will be unable to rely on the OSP with confidence...

...Microsoft wrongly blames the free software legal community for Microsoft's failure to present a promise that satisfies the requirements of the GPL. It is true that a broad audience of developers could implement the specifications, but they would be unable to be certain that implementations based on the latest versions of the specifications would be safe from attack.

Oddly, the SFLC criticizes perceived ambiguity in Microsoft's OSP to preserve goals that are themselves painfully ambiguous: the freedom that the GPL requires, the sensitivity of FOSS developers, and their safety from attack. Further, in positioning these values as standards to gauge Microsoft's OSP, the SFLC uses the GPL, which IPcentral analysis has argued is purposefully unclear and reliant on vague threats of community enforcement.

One thing is clear though- the SFLC and the FOSS Movement will criticize all instances that do not advance their ideals. They are simply destructive and find weakening the efforts of others as its own reward.