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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.'"
Bush not really a Muslim.
Babies not really delivered by storks.
Bears do not actually have modern sanitation.
By summer it was all gone...now shesmovedon. --
Looks like an 'open and shut' case to me...
Almost everyone uses Microsoft Office as opposed to the various flavors of OpenOffice, StarOffice, etc. Not speaking of its fairness, this is a very effective strategy from Microsoft and not at all surprising.
It's a blatant abuse of their virtual monopoly, but there hasn't really been an effective incentive for them to stop taking such actions in the past. Why would they refrain from continuing such behavior?
I'm a big tall mofo.
"open" is a four letter word, and to Mr. Gates, it is an obscene four letter word.
www.eFax.com are spammers
"..it is our expectation that the next iteration of the Open Format standard will include some Microsoft proprietary formats."
**TILT**
I guess Proprietary is Open and War is Peace?
<office>??????????????</office>
</xml>
The MS Office open XML file format consists of an XML branch, followed by an Office branch.
Unfortunately, due to the complexities of parsing this branch, it should be passed directly as a parameter into our improved Office ActiveX object.
We are currently developing an addin for firefox as well.
Thank you for looking at this documentation, that will be all.
liqbase
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.
lorem ipsum, dolor sit amet
From NPR...
y Id=4471963
"Morning Edition, January 31, 2005 The government of Brazil says it will switch 300,000 government computers from Microsoft's Windows operating system to open source software like Linux. Microsoft founder Bill Gates wants to meet with Brazil's president to discuss the change. Brazil is dropping all proprietary software."
Listen here: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?stor
The Brazilians are just saying no!