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

Opening?

[wzzrd]

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...

Re:Opening?

[CDarklock]

I find it strange that they say "fully compliant". What if you create a document that is NOT fully compliant? Maybe that substitutes one tag for another? You'd probably need a lawyer to answer that question, but it's an interesting question.

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.

Re:Opening?

[mrchaotica]

You'd probably need a lawyer to answer that question, but it's an interesting question.

And that very fact means it's not open at all...

Proprietary XML?

[sugapablo]

Proprietary XML? Leave it to Microsoft to completely miss the whole damn point.

Re:Proprietary XML?

[0x461FAB0BD7D2]

They got the wrong definition. Redmond thought it meant "eXclusive Markup Language".

Small typos like that get passed around in memos and next thing you know, you have patents for numerous things.

Re:Proprietary XML?

[SolusSD]

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.

The most important is reading...

[vidarlo]

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!

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?

Interesting Quote

[Rude Turnip]

"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.

Sneaky

[danbond_98]

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.

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.

Toilets

[SunPin]

Is there even anything as ubiquitous as Word that we can compare to?

Toilets. I believe toilets are as ubiquitous as Microsoft Word.

Re:Toilets

[Ohreally_factor]

And at $40 per seat on average, toilets are much cheaper than Word.

Re:Not enough - write Mass. Govt.!

[mmkkbb]

using proper English grammer and spelling.

How about, you handle the grammar and I handle the, Spelling. "OK"

Re:Keep DOC closed

[SCHecklerX]

Yes, but allowing read-only access is great, because it is a win for the people. They can read their old stuff in word/excel/powerpoint, and then save it to a new open format. They can then ditch microsoft software entirely without having lost their work and without the need to spend endless hours reformatting a bad import.

DMCA does not ban Reverse Engineering!

[Xoder]

Reverse-engineering for compatibility purposes is still legal under the DMCA. Reverse-engineering is OK as long as you don't do it to infringe upon copyright.

Source, The text of the DMCA, Chapter 12, Section 1201.f (find within page for "reverse engineering")

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.

Re:I'll never understand some arguments

[m50d]

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.

WTF?

[roguer]

XML is a W3C recommendation (not an open standard; W3C makes that distinction for a reason). It is based on SGML (not UML). XML is a meta-markup language like SGML; it is a means of specifying markup languages such as HTML or WML (not a markup language like HTML). Being a W3C recommendation, XML is copyrighted... by the W3C (not it cannot be copyrighted). Patenting and licensing of XML schemas or DTDs (which is what Microsoft did) is not the same thing as copyrighting anything (tools, formats used by tools, whatever) As for You can write anything on paper but it still doesn't make it true? I couldn't agree more. In fact that statement is as true of Slashdot comments as it is of paper. Jeez, I hate Microsoft as much as any Slashdotter, but at least get your facts straight!