Licensing
Microsoft has patents on the technology in JPEG XR. A Microsoft representative stated in a January 2007 interview that in order to encourage the adoption and use of HD Photo, the specification is made available under the Microsoft Open Specification Promise, which asserts that Microsoft allows implementation of the specification for free, and will not file suits on the patented technology for its implementation, as reportedly stated by Josh Weisberg, director of Microsoft's Rich Media Group. As of 15 August 2010, Microsoft made the resulting JPEG XR standard available under its Community Promise.
In addition to the HD Photo specification itself, Microsoft released the "HD Photo Device Porting Kit" in 2006 which provided source code and build configuration files for multiple platforms. While the license for this code was designed to encourage broad adoption in products, the license terms prohibited including any of Device Porting Kit's code in products or systems that use strong copyleft licensing. As a consequence, any implementation that would be suitable for inclusion in a software package distributed under some software licenses, such as the GNU General Public License, would need to be based on the image coding specification document or other software.
In July 2010, reference software to implement the JPEG XR standard was published as ITU-T Recommendation T.835 and International Standard ISO/IEC 29199-5. Microsoft included these publications in the list of specifications covered by its Community Promise.
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