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."

Comments

Hopefully Governments will force this further

[Albanach]

With luck, other government agencies can force this position further. For example if you can't write in these formats, it emans Governemnts can't exchange doccuments for editing to anyone without effectively insisting they own a copy of Microsoft Office.If a governemnt organisation wishes to distribute a form to be completed, a spreadsheet to be filled in etc there are immediate problems.

Equally this still presents a roblem for QUANGOS. Non government organisations that perform the delegated work of governments will not be able to produce doccuments without restriction on which programs can read them. This could present huge confusion for end users who can't be expected to know where that blurry line between organisations lies.

Re:Opening?

[Technician]

'Open' might not be the best word for this...

The best word is "tip" as in the tip of the wedge. Someone somewhere will need to fill out a government form and send it back. The file will be opened to be exported. It will be exported to an open format. The Government will need to open the document. This will either cause the demand for open format support in government by using 3rd party software or Microsoft in order to keep the applications will have to change to meed the consumer requirements to fully support open formats. Tip of the wedge is the best description. The tip is in place. Now the pressure mounts. Let's see what gives next.

Why is so hard to drop MSOfifce?

[vhogemann]

I work for the municipal healthcare dep. at Rio de Janeiro City. Here at Brasil the federal gov. has stabilished a deadline to change most software to opensource or free equivalents by 2007.

So, we started by enforcing the use of OpenOffice in every desktop. The process is simple, if someone want that old 450MHz Duron replaced by a new 2GHz Athlon they must use OpenOffice instead of MSOffice. Its amazing how this argument work!

Mind you that we don't forbid the installation of MSOffice on this new machines. No sir, anyone can BUY and DONATE the licente to the city, so the software can be installed legaly on the computer. Heh, imagine how often it happens!

The next step was to replace Lotus Notes (argh!) with PostFix + Cyrus running on Debian, and installing ThunderBird on every desktop. Most users just loved the change, because the Lotus Notes Client realy suck.

To add an nice touch, every DOC file that pass trough the email system is converted into a PDF, for tha sake of virus-prevention... The only way to pass an editable document thought is to use OpenOffice native format!

One day, I dream of substitute all W2k desktops with Ubuntu Hoary... and tell its just a new version of WindowsXP. With most of the users already using OpenOffice, ThunderBird and Firefox I gess none of the users will notice the change! ;-)

Re:Why is so hard to drop MSOfifce?

[vhogemann]

We just use wordview to convert from DOC to HTML, then pipe the output to htmldoc. The conversion is FAR from perfect. But thats the point... to get perfect documents the user must use OpenOffice, or zip the file.