Microsoft is working on a OOXML SDK for managed languages. They have announced a roadmap:
Being selfish here, I would love to see this SDK relreased under an MS-PL license myself, I think it would be great to get folks outside of the Windows world consume and produce OOXML files easily.
This is a win-win for everyone. Microsoft gets more products consuming and producing OOXML documents on the Windows and MacOS worlds through Mono, and we get a great API to use on Linux with .NET languages.
Although I have emailed a few friends, am not sure am reaching the right people inside Microsoft. I would love to discuss the advantages that MS-PLing the code base would have.
It has to be under a license like the MS-PL as opposed to just a license to use and distribute on Linux for this code to make it and be distributed eventually into Linux distributions.
Posted on 22 Mar 2008