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

Good or bad?

[ctr2sprt]

If the result of this is MS fully opening the MS Office file formats, so that every other office suite out there can read and write them with 100% compatibility, then that's great! It's not as good for open source as mandating the use of e.g. OO.o would be, but it's still good, and more importantly it focuses more on freedom. (I don't see how being forced to use OO.o would be any better than being forced to use MS Office. I still don't have a choice either way.)

I did RTFA and it's a little unclear as to whether this is what's actually happening or not, but I can certainly hope.

Re:Good or bad?

[grasshoppa]

If the result of this is MS fully opening the MS Office file formats, so that every other office suite out there can read and write them with 100% compatibility, then that's great! It's not as good for open source as mandating the use of e.g. OO.o would be, but it's still good, and more importantly it focuses more on freedom.

Were this the case, then it'd actually be better for the OSS crowd than mandating the use of any specific application. Any app, anywhere, can read and write MS docs with complete confidence. Nothing to sneeze at.

That said, it remains to be seen what this translates into. I'm betting they open up their schema a bit, but leave the actual data storage closed.

Microsoft *wants* to play nice, but...

[Dink Paisy]

Microsoft really wants to be a good guy. The thing that remains to be seen is if they are any good at it. This is the latest move. Earlier moves include lots of customer communication initiatives, encouraging employee blogs, and settling open legal issues so that Microsoft is not seen as happy to be in court.

Microsoft is losing customers, particularly European and American state governments, because they don't like Microsoft. Microsoft really does have the best office suite in a technical sense. OO.o is generally less intuitive, and has less features (particularly in spreadsheets, but even the word processor lacks much advanced functionality). Costs are hard to judge, but most studies suggest that using a free office suite instead of MS Office won't pay off over the time periods that corporations and governments make long range financial plans. Switching to OO.o is about politics, not technical or financial superiority.

It's also difficult to switch right now, partially because of proprietary lock-in to the file format. That's one of the things that makes switching so expensive (although probably not the major one, with OO.o import filters being somewhat decent). Customers want to be free to switch. They also want to be free to generate documents from sources other than MS Office and import them natively, and they want to be able to process documents using their own custom tools. Open file formats help all of those things, and so customers are happy.

Microsoft really wants to make customers happy. Opening file formats helps, so Microsoft is doing that. There are risks; if customers continue to hate Microsoft, and Microsoft makes it easier to switch away from them, the obvious result is losing customers. The upside is that they may make customers happy, convincing more to stay. Being a nice guy is directly connected to making customers happy.

From an open-source community view, opening file formats is good. It makes interoperability easier. By itself, though, it's not enough to make customers happy, or to make Microsoft a friend to the OSS community. More moves are necessary, and what they are and when (if ever) the will come is still a big question.

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.