Brian Jones, who looks after the XML file formats in Microsoft Office, has commented on his blog about the PDF spat with Adobe (below). He says: "In order to work around this, it looks like we're going to offer it as a free download instead. At least that way it's still free for Office users." He adds:
This really is one of those cases where you just have to shake your head. Adobe got a lot of goodwill with customers, particularly in government circles, for making PDF available as an open standard. It's amazing that they would go back on the openness pledge. Unfortunately, the really big losers here are the customers who now have one extra hassle when they deploy Office.
This is also surprising to me given that certain governments have viewed PDF as being more open than Open XML, yet Open XML is now proceeding through Ecma and there is a clear commitment from Microsoft that it will not sue anyone for using the formats. Anyone can build support for our formats, and we've already seen people starting to do this today (a couple weeks ago I actually referred to a demo we saw from the Novell folks where they had a prototype of a product using the Office Open XML formats). I don't think this was the intention, but Adobe seems to be saying that PDF is actually not open (or that it is open for some, but not for others). I'm not sure that any of those government policy make[r]s could justify this outcome.
Comment: Is this a reference to the hypocrisy of the European Commission? Surely not!
Background: The standards for Office Open XML File Formats are being established by the Ecma International Technical Committee (TC45), which includes representatives from Apple, Barclays Capital, BP, The British Library, Essilor, Intel, Microsoft, NextPage, Novell, Statoil and Toshiba, among others. Meetings have been hosted by Apple and the British Library. See http://openxmldeveloper.org/
Update: Brian Jones has now posted a Follow-up on PDF legal issues, to "help to clear up some of the speculation I've seen out there".
Comment: I'd also like to spell out that Office 2007's PDF support is a one-way operation: Save. As Micrososft's Cyndy Wessling says here: "We are neither shipping a special viewer nor doing any work to make PDF files readable or editable by the Office applications." Under the circumstances it would be silly for Microsoft not to follow the standard. The sole aim is for PDF files produced by Office to be readable by other people's PDF readers.
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