The Danish Ministry of Science has promoted the recently released Micosoft XML schema as a big step toward an open standard based format for interoperable exchange of document data within the Danish public sector. Whether this is really the case has been questioned by many – in particular by the Danish Source Vendors Association.

This document published by the Computer and Communication Industry Association – an organisation generally not very friendly with Microsoft! – gives good arguments against the claim that the Microsoft XML schema are anything but to be considered as open standards.

Another problematic aspect of implementing the Microsoft XML schema as open standards is that they have been patented by Microsoft. Not that a open standard cannot be patented, but that the schema’s real openess hinged decisively on whether their patent licensing terms are open in the way that for instance the GPL is open from a copyright perspective.