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Microsoft Office Formats Not Really Being Opened
Contradicting this earlier article claiming otherwise, smith_barney writes "Contrary to reports, Microsoft is not opening up its proprietary Office XML schemas. Essentially, the state of Massachusetts is simply repositioning what it considers an 'open format.' According to a report in BetaNews, Microsoft told the state it would ease licensing restrictions, but only for 'end users who merely open and read government documents.' This hasn't stopped Microsoft from tooting its horn, but Jupiter Research senior analyst Joe Wilcox says, 'Buzz about so-called open formats is little more than PR FUD.'"
Seriously, how many people need stuff in Office that isn't in OpenOffice.org?
I installed Open Office for a staff member of a customer's company. She had been using a computer with Microsoft Word before. She didn't notice that anything had changed.
Probably a lot of us on Slashdot are very sensitive to GUI design, but many people aren't.
There is already a truly open office format developed by OASIS.
Microsoft can read the writing on the wall and is trying to combat a truly open standard with their patent encumbered version.
What we need is OASIS support everywhere, including M$ Office. We need to develop plug-ins with easy/friendly install and stick them on a website so that even a novice user will be able to get it on their system and be able to share OASIS docs.
I also think that when you say "Open" what you actually mean is something closer to "Free." Open Source is a notoriously pragmatic term, whereas Free Software aims more for philosophical freedom ("free as in speech"). Proprietary stuff is far less likely to be Free than it is to be Open.
I think I just confused myself with that one; maybe I should put away this RMS-autographed Ouija board I've got on my desk.
Whilst the annoucement in yesterdays /. was a licence that was gpl-incompatible, it was (afaict) within the scope of existing open licences (it didn't read too disimilar to an old-style bsd licence) - I certainly didn't notice any restrictions on writing, and since that is still up on MS's page, i'm guessing that possibly the chap quoted here was speaking unaware of that announcement. either that or MS's site was hacked or maybe I've just misread something.
"Success is based on knowing how far to go in going too far"
Cue all the "I really need [obscure function XYZZY] in {Word, Excel}" bots from Microsoft!
Not everybody who uses M$ Office is doing trivial work, some of the secretaries where I work use it's advanced features to save immense amounts of time. You can moan about people that need functions that OpenOffice doesn't have but it still won't make OpenOffice better than M$ Office. Tossing about pharses like: "Well then don't use that function" is not an option for a poweruser, he/she will bin OpenOffice and write it off. The day that OpenOffice supports all the advanced features in M$ Office that I use and does so without falling apart I'll switch. Until then M$ Office is a superior product, be it on Windows, Linux or my prefferred OS.X. So let's keep things in perspective. I'm hoping OpenOffice will be able to compete with M$ Office sooner rather than later but hyping OpenOffice up will only hurt it.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
We probably were all wishing for the same, but that said, "opening" the format is probably harder than it sounds.
My understanding of the Office document formats -- which comes entirely from reading rants by OO.org and other projects to write office suites so take it with a big grain of salt -- is that the format itself is made up of serializations of stuff like activex control states. In other words, non-trivial.
I don't know if you or anybody here ever wrote a BeOS "replicant", but it was sort of like ActiveX in that they were serializable classes which could be instantiated by any program, by dlopening the replicant's source executable and running the exported code with the serialized state as initialization parameters. It was really cool -- an app could send a replicant to another app and whammo, you had stuff like a web-browser embedded on the desktop running in the desktop process, or a tray-item using your app's code, but running in the deskbar's process.
Anyway, given that Office uses this kind of approach, it would be near 100% *impossible* to get the state out without the source activex component. Unless the state itself is described in a 100% abstract manner. Which I doubt. The data is almost certainly just a serialization of the internal state of the activex control which created/modified/rendered it.
Now, I know that this kind of stuff only applies to Office when Word or Excel is embedding charts or whatnot from other parts of the office suite, but the fact is this is a useful ( and good ) way to get interoperability, even if it means that it's completely non-portable. Given MS's history, I doubt they've taken a simple approach.
I'm sure there could be better ways, and I imagine OO.org is taking a maximum-interoperability approach...
Anyway, I'm just saying. I don't think MS *could* open the format -- at least not as regards document embedding.
Rant over.
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He also seems not to be able to comprehend what he read. Read this for a FAQ: http://www.microsoft.com/Office/xml/faq.mspx. It is very clear that the formats are still Open, for any sensible definition of Open.
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and read this for yourself: http://www.microsoft.com/office/xml/janletter.msp
In paritcular the quote: "We are acknowledging that end users who merely open and read government documents that are saved as Office XML files within software programs will not violate the license" DOES NOT mean that that is the only licensable use of the schema.
This is really ridiculous. People need to learn to read and comrehend before they spout off.
We have the latest version of Office installed here (whatever it happens to be. I try to avoid Windows systems whenever possible). A few weeks ago someone brought in their thesis, saved in the version of Office they use at home to print. Loading it completely destroyed the formatting throughout the document. The only solution we found was to install PDFCreator on his home machine and bring in the PDF. Office has always had problems with backwards compatibility (I recall a number of Word 2 documents that didn't open correctly in Word 6), and this seems not to have improved. A number of organisations are still using Office 97 because they have standardised on the Office 97 file format for internal use and don't want to break things.
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