There's no doubt about it: Adobe's Portable Document Formatbetter known as PDFis a choice tool for digital document delivery. Some might say that it's the tool for delivering complex documents to wide array of users, as its design allows for faithful rendering on any platform that supports PDFapplication issues, font problems, layout quirks, etc., need need not apply.

Enter Microsoft. The company has been toiling away on its own "portable" document technology for some time and plans to make a splash with it in 2007. Dubbed the XML Paper Specification (or more succinctly, XPS), Microsoft plans support for the new format in both Windows Vista and Office 2007. In response, Adobe went to EU regulators earlier this year to ask that they bar Microsoft from including XPS support in Windows Vista, fearing that the ability to create XPS documents "for free" could cut into their ability to sell PDF creation software to Windows users.

Now in a move to appease EU regulators, Microsoft is going to step things up a notch and try to push XPS through as a standard. For Adobe, this could ultimately make XPS morenot less—popular.

EU making XPS a better competitor?

For its part, Microsoft had previously indicated that its XPS technology would be licensed "royalty-free" to developers, and the company also promised a so-called "covenant not to sue" provision for businesses working on XPS print support, scanning technologies, and certain graphics display technologies.

However, at the behest of the EU, Microsoft is now taking matters a step further. A company spokesperson told Ars Technica that Microsoft "agreed to submit our new fixed-layout document formatthe XML Paper Specificationto a standards-setting organization, and to revise the licensing terms on which the specification is made available to other software developers."

Microsoft is looking again at its license in order to make it compatible with open source licenses, which means that the "covenant not to sue" will likely be extended to cover any intellectual property dispute stemming from the simple use or incorporation of XPS. The end result is that using XPS may be considerably more attractive for developers now that the EU has apparently expressed concerns over the license.

The company has not hinted to which standards body it would submit XPS, but a few things are clear already. First, standards approval will see Microsoft opening XPS to the point that any platform could theoretically support it, including Linux and Mac OS X. If it remains royalty-free, this could mean a proliferation of support for the format. Second, given that the EU is pushing Microsoft to be more open with XPS, we can expect Microsoft to take an approach similar to Adobe: the specification would remain "open" but also controlled by the company.

Until details of Microsoft plans are available, it's difficult to say how XPS will ultimately be positioned by the company. We do wonder if the EU hasn't in effect made XPS that much more of a PDF competitor, however, by leading Microsoft to adopt more open licensing. If Adobe had hoped that the EU would ask Microsoft to remove XPS from Vista, the end result is probably the farthest thing from what they wanted.