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.'"

Comments

Re:Umm....

[TomorrowPlusX]

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.