Microsoft Opening Office XML Formats

Posted by ryuzaki0 on Sunday January 30, 2005 @02:51AM from the what-does-that-mean-exactly dept.

sriram_2001 writes "Microsoft has opened up the XML schemas for Office 2003, thereby silencing a lot of criticism. This could potentially open the way for several government contracts as certain governments have made open standards (and not open-source) a pre-requisite. In their FAQ, Microsoft not only says that open source developers can distribute software built using them, but also that they'll make all future updates available using the same terms. Here is the Official Microsoft Site and CRN and Techworld have stories about it."

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But Office XML Formats are NOT the standard... by rhadc · 2005-01-30 04:56 · Score: 1, Redundant

As far as I know, Microsoft's binary document formats are the standard, not it's XML formats. The binary formats are the ones that can be read by Office 97 forward, and those are the ones by which the world of office productivity is still ruled. These open formats might be nice to have, and they might even shed light on how the binary formats work, but they are not all that is needed to open the door to proper open source implementation of the standards.

rhadc