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Josh Ledgard On MS's Future Open Source Efforts
prostoalex writes "Josh Ledgard from Microsoft, the developer responsible for open-sourcing WiX and WTL, is looking for opinions on what Microsoft should do next in regards to the open source movement that he himself established within the company. "Would you have interest in working on these types of projects with Microsoft? If not, what could entice you? If so, what would be your motivation?", asks Josh." Update: 08/24 19:04 GMT by T : As Ledgard writes on his site, "I am NOT the person responsible for the WIX/WTL projects. I cite them as examples and am working with people who where responsible for those projects to enable more of the same for the groups I work in." Sorry for the misattribution!
Um, yea, as the article states: http://sourceforge.net/projects/wix/ and http://sourceforge.net/projects/wtl/
Yes, they even won an award for that one.
It is your personal duty to fight for what is right on a daily basis. Ignoring injustice is identical to approving
I remember fixing bugs in QBasic Nibbles. There were two notable ones, as I recall: First, if you hit Pause, and your target number was located in the same part of the screen where the Pause box showed up, it wasn't redrawn and basically turned invisible. Second was a UI tweak/bug: they turned off Number Lock, but not until all the screens asking you for... numbers. =b
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
1. MS did offer IE for free AND bundled with the OS, so it's by far a more aggressive way.
2. Open standards and Open source software are two different things. Proprietary software may still support open standards like HTML and XML, I fail to see your point.
3. Sun also supports the Netbeans project, which is OSS. Their Sun Studio is a more advanced version, but they do offer an open source solution to it as well
They do. You can license them. Trouble is, once you have, you're bound by quite a number of restrictions One of the POI developers (Jakarta Word/Excel project) recently had to stop, as he'd changed employers to someone who'd licensed the specs: leaving email What would be nice is getting those docs without all the heavy licensing
This post will enter the public domain 70 years after my death, unless Disney buys another extension.
MS Office files are actually miniature filesystems in their own right, containing serialized objects that are the in-memory representation of a document. There is no intermediate step between the objects that are the document in-memory that translates it into ".doc format" on the disk - it's just the object itself.
So:
No. You are wrong. The file formats are documented completly internally. You can read these documents if you pay some money and sign some NDAs.
Back in the day most programs stored data in binary format. it was how things were done. XML wasn't a dirty look in the W3C's eyes yet. They changed the format between versions because everyone did it that way. Never ascribe to malice that which can be explained by stupidity.
--- Justin Dearing http://www.justaprogrammer.net/ We're just programmers.
No, they own the origional copyright, so they can license what they want under what license they want. They dont have to opensource everything IE touches if they opensourced IE. Hell, they could pick 10 lines from the WINNT kernel and slap an opensource license on those lines of code without having to give up the entire kernel.
Basically if you are the full copyright owner, the opensource license doesnt apply to you.
...responsible for open-sourcing WiX and WTL
Correct me if I am wrong but since the WTL is written primarily in C++ templates then Microsoft had no choice in making in open or closed source. WTL is a collection of header files. You can't make a binary library with that alone.
Um... visual studio actually has a project type of "Visual Studio Add-in". MS exposes a large amount of the functionality in this project type, and allows you to build tightly integrated plug-ins that modify and extend behavior.
All of your nicer 3rd party tools integrate right into VS. Microsoft has been known to purchase these components for the purpose of releasing them with visual studio. I don't remember for sure, but I think they're doing something with nUnit in visual studio team system.
Either way, point is that visual studio is quite open. You just don't get the source.
Hahaha, I guess you've never read the DOC specs. I read a very old version of them that was distributed/leaked one time on MSDN many years ago - you can get it from the WvWare homepage.
Basically the Word specifications are nearly incomprehensible to human beings, let alone the code. Given that the specs actually partly consist of copy/pasted code I think even if Word were open sourced we'd only be a bit further in having OpenOffice and the like able to read them.
The Word developers use structures with members names like fcPlcffldHdrTxbx. It's hungarian taken to the logical extreme. Here's a line from one of the struct definitions:
FTC rgftcStandardChpStsh[3]; // ftc used by StandardChpStsh for this document
Helpful, isn't it? I'm convinced the Word team are actually robots from the 23rd century, no people could have produced this.
Mind that the specs appear to be internal documentation yet are still incomplete!
Basically it would not surprise me if the internals of Word are like the internals of Windows: the people who truly understood them left or retired years ago leaving a mess of interlocking systems and hacks that nobody can fully comprehend.
IE is integrated into the OS in the sense that if you remove it, a fair few things (like lots of functionality in Explorer, also lots of parts of Windows Help and HTMLHelp) would stop working.
However, most of the IE related code is in several seperate files, specifically:
hlink.dll (HyperLink Library)
iexplore.exe (main program exe)
imgutil.dll (Image Decoder API)
mshtml.dll (HTML rendering engine)
jscript.dll (JScript runtime)
shdocvw.dll (Internet Explorer core)
wldap32.dll (Win32 LDAP implementation)
msxml.dll (XML parser)
pngfilt.dll (PNG library)
and probobly a few others as well.
Microsoft would have nothing to loose and probobly a fair bit to gain if they were to Open Source those bits that are "IE" (and not the other bits connected to, related to or used by it e.g. Windows Media, Shell, Windows Core, Outlook, OLE, COM, Common Controls etc)
Especially if they then took the best "user changes" and put them into the official tree and future IE updates.
When Microsoft bought Entropic, they released the source code for ESPS under a BSD-type license. ESPS is a very cool speech processing toolkit that used to be heavily used in research. Unfortunately, AFAIK the code doesn't compile out of the box. Some of the code from ESPS is however used in Snack/Wavesurfer.
Please alter my pants as fashion dictates.
Well, write an RTF->XML converter. RTF (new version comes out with each version of Word) is the linga franca of Word. The important stuff in a Word file are the RTF parts. The rest of the info is either COM Compound Document stuff or metadata.
RTF, unfortunately, isn't nearly as strict as even HTML when it comes to closing tags, matching things, etc. But it is doable.
And, I think, (well-written) RTF->Word, but not all Word->RTF. The XML file format is just a translation of RTF -> XML+XSD.
Besides, the XML-based Office document formats are not the default formats anyways for Office XP/2003...
Open-sourcing the Office document formats would mean open-sourcing a good chunk of COM as well.
For quite some time, the internal structure of Excel files was published by Microsoft. XBIFF5 is the last reference I saw of it (Excel 5). Then Excel 97 came out, and everything started to be wrapped in OLE Documents (now called COM compound document). So the XBIFF5 stuff was the same, it was just stuck inside the COM document container.
Now, not sure. Excel 97-2000 have same internal structure...