Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Partially Opens Proprietary XML Format
eschasi writes "Groklaw has an article up
reporting that Microsoft
is going to open up their XML representation of the DOC format in response to Massachusetts' demand for
open formats. According to Groklaw there are some interesting caveats involved in the move. From the license: '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'. While opening up the format even partially is a good idea, it's still a far cry from folks being able to write programs that create DOC-compatible files."
Mind you, this is - as I understand it at Groklaw - merely an opening to make GPL-applications able to read (not write!) government made (nothing else) documents, without interfering with MS patents. 'Open' might not be the best word for this...
The right to own data was lost with closed format, since it did require a license to read something you might have produced yourself. For a private person, it might be sad. For a corporate needy of its archives of past correspondance, it can be catastrofal. That microsoft opens up their format for reading, and specifies parts of it, makes it possible to write software to convert this data to a open format, or index it and such. Therefor, we can still save in MS format, but have much-less tie in.
I'm only wondering how far it goes, if it goes as far as to say that I'm allowed to make a non-MS certified opensourced bot that crawls my disk, and indexes office XML files... And what if a corporate does so, will they be allowed?
Assembling etherkillers for fun an profit
"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."
It seems that the ability for a citizen to read and access government documents should surpass all other interests, regardless of licensing issues. In other words, even if a government employee was boneheaded enough to save a document in a proprietary format, my ability access to the information in that document should be guaranteed no matter what, licenses be damned.
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
Ah, and once again Microsoft do what they do best: create a solution to a demand which doesn't actually solve the problem but your average politician can point at and say "they've cooperated". Bit like their server licencing and the judgement against them in the EU, it's providing a solution which is useless yet looks good on paper.
Yes, and no. There are some issues with formatting and the positioning of content, I hope that this partial release of information can help the OO.org team to improve OO write.
If they open up the format just enough so we can read it , it will be a nice enough start so we can officaly open the documents then save them as a fully open format. ,
As much as i would love them to be made to play fair and open the format fully
Opening it enough to make it easy to parse gives us all we need incase of the disapearence of word , or MS trying to force an upgrade by breaking compatability in some way.
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
Does anybody really want to keep this format going? Let Microsoft do whatever the hell they want and focus on moving people to open source one person at a time.
Laws are for people with no friends.
...is 100% closed.
if i'm a grammar nazi, you're an illiteracy nazi.
"Also, MS has some bogus patents on their .doc format and we all know how many years they can tie things up in the courts for."
Gee, if that were true, you'd think OpenOffice, an app that threaten's one of MS's actual monopolies, would have been ceased and desisted by now.
"Derp de derp."
I think that the reason it became so popular was the close file format.
Whaaaa? Cart or horse, which comes first?
Dude, Word did not get popular because of proprietary file format. Users don't give a rats ass about file format until they need to export/import from one to the other. That the file format is commonly used is a result of the programs popularity. Word got popular for other reasons such as aggressive marketing, aggressive pricing, aggressive positioning, feature richness, useability, blah, blah.
You forget one thing: it's not their document that people wants to read, it's the customers', just stored in their format. It's like the guy who built my house refusing to tell me what size bricks he used, so that I have to hire him to do all the repairs.
I am trolling
This at least gives us the right to our own data back, since we can then convert it to a more useable format. So it seems like we've won the first battle, but not the war!
= /library/en-us/dnrtfspec/html/rtfspec.asp. You have won nothing, you do know that Microsoft used to publish word and excel formats on their website? It did not impeded MS's dominance, it did not help the competition.
You never lost the right to your data, you could always output your data into something else. Text, RTF if you wanted to preserve formatting. RTF's specification and a sample reader are published by Microsoft, http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url
If you cared, and few really do, you could always have written an RTF file with word. RTF is documented and sample readers are available from Microsoft, http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url= /library/en-us/dnrtfspec/html/rtfspec.asp. Word and excel format used to be published, it hardly mattered with respect to Microsoft achieving dominance or helping the competition.
We can't both preach that "HTML is a Markup Language, not a layout language" (which is true) and at the same time propose it as an alternative format for documents from programs in which exact fixed layout on a given medium (printed paper of a certain size) is expected. Web pages on the other hand resize and reflow and are supposed to adapt to different screen sizes and devices of different capabilities/fonts/etc.
Two different types of files for two different purposes.
The relevant point of using XML is that it's a standard for serializing and deserializing structured data in a way that doesn't depend on the type of data. So it's an advantage in maintainability over their old binary formats, and makes it easier for different Office versions to be compatible with each other.
The only benefit to them of XML being commonly associated with public standards is PR.
XML was designed to alleviate problems exchanging data between different formats. Using namespaces to define what different fields meant data could be exchanged by simply translating the namespaces. It is almost pointless, aside form being human readable, for microsoft to use XML if they are going to make it proprietary and not allow any other programs to read/write it. allowing readability of the format is one step forward.
> Why does Microsoft have to open up their file format anyway?
They don't have to. Let them keep it.
On the other hand, I want the right to participate in my country's politics without having to pay the Microsoft tax. Hence, government must use open standards.
I personally believe that government should avoid software that uses proprietary formats from the outset. Some people, however, believe otherwise, and they are lobbying for a compromise that will make it legit for government to use Microsoft software.
"This at least gives us the right to our own data back, since we can then convert it to a more useable format."
Not correct. "We" will have no right to read or write data in their format. Only "Government documents" may be read. That doesn't give most of us shit.
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
You miss the fact that formatting of the document is also part of the data contained in that document.
specifically of GPLed software. They are putting loads of effort to get around that but GPL software is creeping up everywhere and they don't know how to stop it.
I think the courts should under no circumstances let this pass. This is a bunch of BS, and I think that unless Microsoft complies fully and delivers the complete format of the data files, they should be fined not $5,000,000 per day until they comply but $5,000,000 per day until at least 100 independant open source computer programs exist that can handle Microsoft document files in their entirety, with no major user complaints about the functionality of these programs.