As you may have read, a judge recently upheld a court ruling which bans Microsoft from selling Word 2007 after January 11, 2010, due an XML patent infringement. That was yesterday.
Today, Microsoft announced that they have released a patch which corrects the patent infringement, bringing the Office 2007 code under compliance:
The 2007 Microsoft Office OPK Master Kit Download, available on Microsoft’s OEM Partner Center, strips Word and other Office programs of custom XML editing capabilities.
“The following patch is required for the United States,” Microsoft said in a message on the site.
The 2007 Microsoft Office OPK Master Kit Download (12.9 MB) can be found at the Microsoft OEM Partner Center. The site also says:
After this patch is installed, Word will no longer read the Custom XML elements contained within DOCX, DOCM, or XML files. These files will continue to open, but any Custom XML elements will be removed. The ability to handle custom XML markup is typically used in association with automated server based processing of Word documents. Custom XML is not typically used by most end users of Word.
Pretty quick turnaround, but I have a feeling they were working on this for a while…