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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?"
state: We're going to go to open formats!
MS: Psst.. if you pay us, you can stay with closed formats instead! You know, the ones we use to squeeze you for $$$ ever other year?
state: Great idea! We love paying to be locked in!
Bah.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
They are trying to get Microsoft jealous by flirting with opensource to get Microsoft to lower their prices. Nothing to see here. Move along.
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"Is this just another move to encroach on the open source community?"
Well...yes. Why would you expect Microsoft to do anything different? Open source is one of Microsoft's primary competitors - they're certainly not going to do anything to help it along.
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For all software developers to use documented, open, royalty-free standards for file and other information interchange formats?
If the formats are open, then anyone can write software to read and write them. Surely this is at least a good first step in that direction?
It's official. Most of you are morons.
... so what are the terms of this new licensing model?
Long answer: Is this question just another move to ask rhetorical but inflammatory questions on the front page?
You guy love piling on to Microsoft, but don't some of you remember when nothing talked to anything else? Don't you remember what a bully IBM was when they could be? Don't you remember how IBM gouged you for software mainframe licenses that continued as long as you had those ugly beats? At least these two companies gave us some standards!!! Now, nearly anything will talk to most anything else with almost no effort on the user's part. Consumers voted for these two companies products with their dollars. Consumers got what they voted for, some interoperability standards for hardware and software that actually work! IBM for the most part has fallen by the wayside as far as PC's go --- waiting to see how this "on-demand thingy" works out. Perhaps Microsoft will become only a memory of old geezers. Open source ideas are great! I hope in the long run that it succeeds. But Bill Gates isn't really the devil, (off topic) nor is Karl Rove for that matter. At work I mostly use AIX and Solaris with some Win2K. When I am at home, give me an XP platform for my Far Cry and Half-Life2. When good games are released for Linux, then I'm onboard man... until then, I'm with Bill.
You forgot an E.
Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.
We remember Microsoft's TCP stack being a little bit different, which sped things up - if you were talking MS-to-MS. Sometimes. And sometimes it broke stuff badly.
We remember Windows explicitly not talking to DR-DOS, and the solitary little bit of encrypted code in the installer to achieve that.
We remember CIFS back when it was called LANMAN, and please pass me that bucket.
We remember last week when a customer's WinME machine refused to tune into the same wavelengths as XP SP2. We remember another customer who has to run one CAD machine on Win98SE and the other on WinME otherwise for no discernable reason they can't talk to the big plotter.
We remember MS-DOS being deliberately built to not run Lotus 1-2-3.
We remember M80 being different to every other Z80 assembler on the planet.
We remember Bill choosing \ for a path separator when everything else bar a few (VMS comes to mind) used
We remember not being able to authenticate against MS-Exchange because it only trusted Outlook's proprietary and secret authentication protocols.
We remember unilateral extensions to Kerberos that broke practically everything else using standard Kereberos.
We remember a company which knew so little about its own network protocols that it went to the Samba team for information - and today is working pretty much as hard as it can (without getting obviously unclean hands) to slow down development of that same Samba.
Odd. That's what most of the larger game developers said.
Hey, did the penny drop for you yet?
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Good post.
OO.o is generally less intuitive, and has less features (particularly in spreadsheets, but even the word processor lacks much advanced functionality).
IMHO, anyone with prior exposure to MS Office can't say whether or not OOo is less intuitive than MS Office. It can be less familiar if all you know is just MS Office. For either office suite to be less intuitive than the other, you'd have to test with people who have had zero exposure to said office suites.
Just a question here, what would Microsoft have to do for you to consider them to be a friendly corporation, rather than an evil and menacing corporate giant? I kind of like them already, but I know I'm unusual in that regard.
With regards to "opening up" formats, as with the MS Office XML schemas, they'd have to offer a true roalty-free license for access and use - no patent license traps. That would be a start.
Just my two cents.
zWhat would an EWOULDBLOCK block, if an EWOULDBLOCK could block would? -- me
> I would INSTANTLY switch to "open source" operating systems and applications if I could find some that met my needs.
I did so years ago, and seldom if ever have a need to boot Windows due to applications that I need myself.. I do have a need for Windows due to customers using it tho.
> Who wouldn't?
Obviously many people.
There are applications to suit the needs of the average user in many cases, but the average user is not willing to invest the time in making those work and learning to use them. I did because I already had another need for open source software (well, actually for a Unix like system, and buying a sun/sgi/hp/ibm unix box was out of the question for me at that time)
What people often forget is that OSS software might be free as in beer, but you have to work a bit harder to use it for now.
Linux and FreeBSD and similar systems have come to a point where for a knowledgable user, they may be as easy or easier to install and use then Windows and even OS X, but that doesn't really help the average user. Fetting a machine with a reinstalled and preconfigured Linux desktop and modern installers for comemrcial software for Linux go a long way to making this a possibility, but as long as the default offer from your average computer shop is some x86 box with XP home, it will take a long time to get there.
Oh, and even for those who do know a bit about computers in general, a different system still takes a bit of time to get used to, and not all of them are prepared to put in that time.