The contract clause may have been necessary because of Sun's intimate relationship with the Open Office project, analysts say. Sun engineers are the major contributors to Open Office and the Santa Clara, California, company retains the copyright to all software that is contributed to the project.
Because of this tight relationship, Microsoft may have felt it necessary to remove any ambiguity about whether or not Open Office users are indemnified by the Sun-Microsoft agreement, said Matt Rosoff, analyst with Directions on Microsoft Inc. "They wanted to make it clear that ... just because Sun and Microsoft have a cross-licensing agreement, that doesn't mean that Sun has the right to turn that indemnification over to an open source organization," he said.
Ironically, the contract clause has come to light just as Microsoft is beginning to make overtures toward the Open Office development community. Microsoft's German subsidiary, Microsoft Germany GmbH, plans to exhibit at the Open Office Conference 2004 being held in Berlin next week.
Though Microsoft offers XML (Extensible Markup Language) support with its Microsoft Office 2003 productivity software, the company has been criticized by Open Office developers for its refusal to participate in an OASIS-led (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards) effort to develop a standard file format for productivity applications.
Microsoft decided to participate in the conference to learn about Open Office and "take an active part in the dialogue and to discuss important topics related to open standards," said Sandra Schwan, a Microsoft spokeswoman, via e-mail. "This conference is not about selling products," she said.
The Open Office Conference 2004 charges exhibitors €500 (US$613) to participate in the conference. It attracted 300 attendees during its inaugural event last year.
Microsoft declined to comment on specifics of its April agreement with Sun.
(Joris Evers in San Francisco contributed to this report)
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