Sure, it says "publicly available, openly documented", but I can't actually find a file-format spec anywhere.

Given that CDF files seem to be able to do most things Mathematica can do, I'm guessing that might mean "publically available to anyone who pays us for a Mathematica SDK licence".

>> Wolfram currently provides the CDF specification as a public format, meaning it is publicly available, openly documented, and natively unencrypted.

Sure, but where is it?!

Good luck finding it: http://www.google.com/search?q=Computable+Document+Format+sp...

And they don't state if they hold any patents that covers CDF.

I would imagine any company with a decent size patent portfolio has one that covers this.

Interesting notion that you have to pay a license fee if you want to charge for the document. This means that if you want to do a consultancy report using CDF you have to pay a separate fee even if you already paid for the authoring environment (Mathematica). Maybe Microsoft should pursue this licensing model?

Example CDF files can be opened in any text editor.