Talk about loaded language, eh? "Stolen"? "Banned"? It's a software patent dispute: a little company got in there first and is enforcing their patent, which is so generalised that it was going to catch someone some day. I just read it (US PTO #5,787,449 on
Google Patent Search): it's full of talk about "Metacodes", which simply means "code describing code". No mention of XML, which was not around in 1994, when the patent was taken out.
Microsoft has not been banned from selling Word; this dispute covers one particular feature, "Custom XML". This doesn't even affect Excel or PowerPoint, which also use XML file formats - that's what the X in DOCX or XLSX stands for.
I'm no Microsoft fan, and have pretty-much migrated to Linux already, but even I can see that this piece is knee-jerk Microsoft-bashing. The
Computerworld article takes a more sensible tone, as do
i4i themselves.