Microsoft Eases Licensing On Office 2003 Formats

kfiller writes "Microsoft has negotiated a deal with the state of Massachusetts to lower licensing restrictions on the Excel and Word XML formats in Office 2003, in exchange for the state to reconsider their focus on adopting 'open standards' to adopting 'open formats'. Is this just another move to encroach on the open source community?"

Comments

The old MicroSoft Adage (tm)

[Anonymous Coward]

Extend and embrace. (tm)

This could be good if it's a trend

[Anonymous Coward]

PJ at groklaw has a good read on this at
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=200501141 8070774.
The devil is in the licensing details, but maybe Microsoft has [decided|been forced] to play nice in order to not be excluded.

Commonwealth?

[Anonymous Coward]

Interesting

This hasn't happened yet

[newentiti]

from the link in CRN that TFA referes to : "[Microsoft] has made representation to us recently [that] they're planning to modify that license, and if they're to do so, ..." For those that were fooled by the language of the story and TFA to think that this is done

Re:The real question...

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem is, MS Office is a nice office suite. OpenOffice sucks on almost all fronts. This isn't a troll. I would love nothing more than to switch my company to a free Office suite, since software costs are so high. But at the same time, my employees need to remain as productive, and OpenOffice just doesn't provide that. Mind you, this has nothing to do with training. It has to do with features, speed, and UI, among other things.

I really hate Microsoft file formats

[MarkWatson]

I hate how much effort it is to even pull plain text out of Word and Powerpoint documents.

I just finished up work on a commercial Java text mining package and I spent far too long on code to read Word and Powerpoint files while handling PDF, OpenOffice.org, and AbiWord was fairly simple.

I do have a word (no pun intended :-) of advice for organizations who must use Microsoft office: OpenOffice.org has a batch processing option to recursively search nested directories for Word documents and write out fairly equivalent OpenOffice.org Writer documents (that use a very nice XML format). If I had a company with thousands of Word documents on my servers, I would have an automatic "save to OpenOffice.org, then archive" backup strategy and not have my long term Document store backups in native Word format.

It is not going to happen, but I would love to see pressure from user groups and governments force Microsoft to use the OASIS open XML based document formats. If Microsoft really wanted to give maximum value to their customers, then they would do this on their own (yes, just wishful thinking).

Re:Licensing

[Anonymous Coward]

Under EU law, you can INTEROPERATE or its Monopolistic tactics , you are allowed to REVERSE ENGINEER if they dont give you specs to interoperate with. ITs all about fair trading.

Pitty you are in the US:D

They can do jack shit in the EU and indeed other countries to prevnt access to formats and protocols.

Re:I think MA may be just pulling a Dell...

[jackbird]

No, this is about file formats, not applications, and they do appear to be fairly serious about it.

From the article: "...In our definition, "Open Formats" are specifications for data file formats that are based on an underlying Open Standard developed by an open community and affirmed by a standards body or de facto format standards controlled by other entities that are fully documented and available for public use under perpetual, royalty free, and nondiscriminatory terms.

... An example of an Open Format that we have already characterized is TXT text files and PDF document formats.

...It should be reasonably obvious for a lay person who looks at the concept of Public Documents that we've got to keep them independent and free forever because it is an overriding imperative of the American democratic system. That we cannot have our public documents locked up in some kind of proprietary format or locked up in a format that you need to get a proprietary system to use sometime in the future. So, one of the things that we're incredibly focused on is insuring that the public records remain independent of underlying systems and applications insuring their accessibility over very long periods of time. In the IT business a long period of time is about 18 months, in government it's about 300 years, so we have slightly different perspective."

This not only goes far beyond "flirting with open source to get a better deal," it ignores that angle completely - they'd be happy to buy MS Office if they know they (or anyone else!) can hack together a reader for the format in 300 years based on publicly av ailable information.

Posting has serious ERROR ... please CORRECT

[Anonymous Coward]

Posting quote:
Microsoft has negotiated a deal with the state of Massachusetts to lower licensing restrictions on the Excel and Word XML formats in Office 2003, in exchange for the state to reconsider their focus on adopting 'open standards' to adopting 'open formats'.
---
This statement is not correct. The open format policy is an EXTENSION of the prior open standards policy that still remains in effect. This error is now widely replicated on the net. Please correct.

Open formats will be an additional requirement in the future, not a substitute for open standards. There was no deal in exchange for anything.

Eric Kriss
Secretary, Administration & Finance
Commonwealth of Massachusetts
Boston, MA

Please don't use open formats!

[OwlWhacker]

How can anybody trust a company that desperately begs you not to use open formats?

Why doesn't Microsoft open its formats, and remove all restrictions?