Microsoft CTO Ray Ozzie writes that Microsoft has released another RSS extension specification under CC:

One other important point: We’re releasing the SSE specification under a Creative Commons license – Attribution-ShareAlike.
I’m very pleased that Microsoft is supporting the Creative Commons
approach; you can see more about this at in the licensing section at
the end of the spec.

It’s great to see positive recognition of Creative Commons at a high level in Microsoft.

The spec released is meant to making sharing (in the technical sense of data exchange) of calendars and contact lists really simple by building on data formats used to syndicate blogs.

Sharing calendars and contact lists, though conceptually very simple, turns out to be hard, as evinced by the lack of widely adopted solutions that work outside of a single website or corporate network. Sort of reminds one of the conceptual simplicity and harsh reality of sharing creative works, though the obstacles, largely technical and legal respectively, are very different (though something like “standards politics” plays a role in each).

Note that Creative Commons’ office neighbors are also working on interoperable calendar and contact list sharing.