We’ve been tweaking the schemas – especially wml.xsd – to make the Java classes generated by JAXB’s xjc more user-friendly.

I’m satisfied that this is permitted by ECMA, so I’ve put the modified schemas into subversion .

For anyone interested in the reasoning, the Ecma website says:

“Ecma Standards and Technical Reports are made available to all interested persons or organizations, free of charge and copyright, in printed form and, as files in Acrobat (R) PDF format.”

For this to apply, it needs to be an “Ecma Standards or Technical Report”.

That page says “A Standard or a Technical Report is a formal document prepared by an Ecma Technical Committee and approved by the Ecma General Assembly.”

Office Open XML was so approved.

So the only possible glitch would be words to the effect that the schema aren’t part of the official standard.

I’ve checked the language in parts 2 and 4 (of the Ecma TC45 Final Draft) which says “This Office Open XML specification includes a family of schemas … The normative definition of these schemas reside in an accompanying file named … which is distributed in electronic form only.”

Which makes it clear the schemas are part of the Standard

So the ECMA standard’s XSD are “free of copyright” – an explicit waiver of copyright. So no problemo in creating derivative works.