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We're Open enough, Says Microsoft
An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft Australia has come under fire from rival vendors and open-source advocates for keeping its Office document standards proprietary.
Greg Stone, Microsoft's national technology officer for Australia and New Zealand, faced criticism during his presentation at the Australian Unix User Group conference in Canberra yesterday. However, he stood firm on the company's policy of making the XML schemas for its Office 2003 document standard publicly available provided interested parties sign an agreement with the software heavyweight. "Why should I have to sign an agreement?" one audience member demanded to know."
XML is not a Microsoft format, it's a markup language. RTF is closed, and txt is ASCII standard. Sure they can export to other formats, but the point is that the reason you want to use the native format to begin with is the markup and formatting. If you're just going to export to text, why use Word at all?
No.
A legally binding contractual agreement which you must sign in order to read a document and which restricts both your behavior and what you may do with the information contained in the document is in no way similar to a license attached to a document which says "if you wish to make copies of this document and distribute them to others you must satisfy certain conditions, if you cannot meet these conditions then do not redistribute this document".
Similarly signing an employment contract with the company you work for is not "basically the same" as the "All rights reserved." notice printed on a compact disc you buy.
Have a nice day.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
Actually, OpenOffice's encoding for .doc doesn't work perfectly. And it's a downright bitch if you're trying to pass files between OpenOffice and Word. I was a freelance manual writer for a while, and my copy of Word self-destructed. (It wouldn't take the activation code that was printed ON THE DISK.)
.doc encoder based on intelligent guesswork. If the standards were open, they could get compatability spot on.
So I thought, time to switch to an open alternative. Bad idea. I couldn't pass edits to the engineer I was working with because every time I'd get back a file with corrupted layout and images about the size of Jupiter.
As far as I can tell, this is because they have to build their
A strain of paranoid prevention can be worse than the disease, whate'er the intention.
There is such a format, OpenDocument, it is supported by the upcoming openoffice 2.0 and the next version of staroffice and is listed on oasis-open.org, now if only other opensource apps would start to use it.. And perhaps commercial vendors like wordperfect and apple.
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Define "use". If you use the code internally in your company, you can do what you want with it, including combining it with proprietary code, making changes that you don't distribute, etc. Only once you distribute the code to someone else do you have to abide by the GPL's provisions that said someone else has a right to get a copy of the source (including your modifications).
PenguiNet: the (shareware) Windows SSH client
Hmmmm, AFAIK OpenOffice Writer documents can contain Video, Adio and all other multimedia stuff.
user@ubuntubox:~$ stfu This server is going down for shutdown NOW!
Well, AFAIK you do not have to agree to the GPL to _download_ and _use_ Free software. The GPL is a copyright license, which provides you with the right to distribute the software. Assume that I sell or give you a GPL'ed program (and that I include the source and the license) - you are now in possesion of a legal licensed copy of the program, which you may install and use on your computer as much as you like (copyright/fair use allows the internal copying needed to use the software). If you choose to accept the GPL, you are granted additional rights, above and beyond what copyright/fair use gives you, to copy, distribute, and modify the program, as long as you distribute under the terms of the GPL. If you don't believe me, check the GPL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html) yourself. Term 0 spells out what activities are governed by the GPL.
I believe KOffice is going to support it, too. I'm not sure about AbiWord, though.
Not an answer to your question, but a response to the responses:
:-/
I found it a little funny (well, at 1:50am) that the problems others attribute to OO misinterpreting Word docs are problems I've seen recently, using exactly one installation of Word (2003) on the same machine.
Of course I tried "reveal codes": nothing obvious. I tried exporting to RTF and reimporting (massive file got much much bigger). Ended up cutting and pasting from Word to Notepad (to remove all formatting) and again back to a new Word doc. Problem solved!
Hardly the first time I've had MS documents just become unusable. So I think having public specs and multiple implementations would actually improve MS Office.
Hell, just cleaning the specs up enough to publish would probably pay for itself (from MS' perspective: fewer bugs in MS Office).
Oh, yeah, Word format was gratuitously required.
> With Open Office, I can read and export every major Microsoft file
> in and out of OO.
You can. In same kind of way that you can build a car with sellotape and cerial packets. You get something that's vaguely what you were after, but it doesn't look right and it's kind of messy.
If you've ever tried it on anything other than a very simple letter, you'll know that it doesn't really work AT ALL. The formatting gets completely messed up, things get resized, the layout goes haywire, some text gets lots etc etc... It really doesn't work.
Why? Because OO don't have access to the file format definition, so they have to guess everything. Unfortunatly, it's quite complicated, so despite lots of hard work, they get it wrong. Often.
Apparently they lost this antitrust case or something, and they're punishment is supposed to be opening these formats up. At least, that's what I heard.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
using GPL fonts in a document means the document has to be open, does it not?
No, it does not.
Embedding GPL fonts in a document might mean the document has to be open. But I've never met anyone who embeds fonts in documents. Come to that, I've never seen a GPL font, either.
"My wife is in College and has a lot of term papers to write and share with other student groups for her projects. She is able to do all of this with Open Office by converting to .doc formats without incidents."
My S.O. is a biochemistry researcher, and despite having made sincere efforts to use OO, it has fallen short of meeting her needs. The word processor is fine, actually, but the problems begin with advanced functionality of the spreadsheet, they escalate with integration difficulties between OO apps, and they stop cold with the presentation program being nowhere near a reasonable substitute for powerpoint.
Just one experience, and I'm sure the product has improved significantly since 1.1.2, but there it is. A power user, a true geek, someone who was highly motivated to make it work, couldn't.
OO is a fine word processor, but that's not the whole picture. I've also heard arguments that people don't use many features of the word processor. Well, in a previous career, I was the person who did indeed use pretty much every damn feature of WP5.1, including some quite esoteric things that only legal secretaries probably ever touch. I suspect the claims are made by people who don't know what they are talking about.
On the other hand, OO is pretty complete. But the experience was pretty bad; large datasets linked to complex graphs embedded in a document and a presentation, tended to go to shit; whereas the same tasks were no problem in MS Office. This observation comes from dyed-in-the-wool microsoft-hating geeks who would *really* have liked the results to be different (and who don't have the time or ability to contribute to the OO project to make it better.)
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
Because Microsoft are illegally enforcing a monopoly by forcing others out of the market (not allowing other products/projects to play along)
Only if you are going to modify the document, then distribute it outside your organisation; and even then, you might have to modify the actual font. Otherwise, embedding a font into a document -- provided it is done in such a way that the complete font can be recovered for use in other documents -- would be considered "mere aggregation". At any rate, a document is not generally considered to be a derived work of a font.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
Not ISO, but OASIS Open Document Format.
Actually last time i checked they were , At-least in the EU and the USA.
They have two court orders(atleast) demanding that they open up there formats and APIs so we are all free to use them.
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
Fileextensions:
I think that this standarization might help in persuading governments to choose this new format. Although not an office suite strictly speaking, I wonder about abiword's default file-format... Does/will it use this new standard as the default as well (seems to be a good idea).
No doubt the .doc export in OO.o is less than perfect, but I've seen the same problem you describe happen when exchanging .doc files between the same version of Word on different versions of Windows.
AFAIK there are talks about Abiword joining in, too.
Anyway, KOffice doing OASIS is great because it's much less bloated than OO.
I don't think that the problem is really about understanding how these file formats work. The old .doc format has been reverse-engineered successfully (including features that were not documented by Microsoft) and most parts of the new Office XML format are trivial to understand.
The problem is that XML uses schemas for defining how the data is stored in the document (data types, structure, etc.) and for telling the parsers how the documents can be validated and processed. By not allowing free distribution of this information, Microsoft is making it very difficult for other tools to process the Office XML documents. All Office XML documents contain direct references (URIs) to this information. So regardless of whether the developers of the other tools understand the file formats or not, their tools cannot process the XML documents in the "right" way because the schemas are not available freely.
-Raphaël
I have also tried to persuade the gnumeric guys to support OASIS. The response was basically 'sure we'll export to it if someone codes it. It's up to the distro which format it will export to by default'.
OOo Writer has an "Export to PDF" menu point in the "File" menu. It is ideal for preservation of the format -- unless the receiving party needs to edit it, that is. But in vast majority of cases, just sending over something for people to read, PDF is sufficient.
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"The libraries and component functionality of the OpenOffice.org source code" are LGPL, which allows them to be linked in to proprietary works.
It is also possible to license OO.org under the Sun Industry Standards Source License (SISSL). This allows you to make proprietary, binary only distributions, if you maintain compatibility with with the APIs and XML formats. Microsoft could download the entire source, add an MS-Office GUI and a their own Word importer and make "MS-Office Released" out of it. As long as they don't break any interfaces, that's OK under the SISSL. Why doesn't MS import OO files? Because they don't want to. Perhaps they need some convincing...
Were all Lotus formats (Smartsuites files, Notes files and protocols, etc) all open ? Just out of curiosity..
Here is a book (dead tree with printing inside). Here is a DVD. Can you tell the difference now?
That is the infamous "Actually he didn't - we just made that quote up." - story. The true low-point of The-Register
You should not spread it more. Most of us don't RTFA. Some will get the wrong idea.
Why should I have to create two types of document based on the distribution medium?
Interestingly enough, that requirement was a good chunck of my Organizational Theory/Behavior class last night. You always have to match the presentation of the message to the medium. A large part of the "barriers in formal communication" section of that lecture was about people with attitudes exactly as what you just expressed. Effective communication can mean just a timely text-based email. Or a 30 minute movie. It depends on who, and why, you are communicating. But awareness of the limitations of various media is always necessary. And sometimes, those limitations actually enhance the message by limiting noise.
without MS you have no web/html like we have today
You mean with developers not able to support a 7 year old standard, even though it would make the web a much better place, because IE still won't support all of CSS 1 much less CSS 2?
xml wouldn't get any attention if it wasn't "interwebby"
You mean if the W3C team (who were not MS employees) who developed XML hadn't thought ahead to its potential Internet use?
Or do you mean how IE is the only web browser that doesn't support XHTML, so that web developers still have to write tag-soup HTML 4 or break the standard and send XHTML as HTML in order to reach anyone using IE?
this whole XML thing is a passing phase without MS
You mean like the EU standardizing on an XML file format (OpenDocument), O'Riley and Associates publishing using an XML format (DocBook), the W3C moving EVERYTHING to XML including image formats (SVG) (yes MS is a W3C member, but they are far from the only)...
About the only thing I'll give MS credit for is breaking XSLT off from XSLFO, since the latter was taking way too long to standardize, so that now XSLT can be used independently of XSLFO, both in spec and tools. That's a good thing, I won't deny that. But given everything else they've done to hold back and stiffle the development of the "Interwebby", I'd definitely say that MS has been a net-negative on the XML-based-Internet world.
--GrouchoMarx
Card-carrying member of the EFF, FSF, and ACLU. Are you?
Citizens of various countries were kidnapped, in the middle of the night and shipped to Guantanamo Bay, where they were held, without trial, without being charged, without even being permitted to learn what, if any, evidence there was against them. Let me suggest that this US policy is more antidemocratic, more contrary to the principles of fundamental justice, and more to be feared than your hypothetical UN extradition strawman, where, at least, the prisoners would have charges laid against them, would be free from the fear of torture, and could expect a reasonably fair trial, where they could actually hear the evidence against them.
Did the UN system allow Saddam, and collaborators in other nations to loot the oil for food funds? Yes. The USA is one of the five permanet members of the UN Security Council. So, why doesn't the USA share some of the responsibility for this scandal?
The CPA took over the administration of the remaining $20 billion in May of 2003. Was Iraqi money looted during Paul Bremer's stewardship? Yes. Billions went missing. He blew through almost all of the Iraqi money in not much longer than a year, with very poor audit controls. Billions were expended with no sign that the expenditure was actually spent on anything that benefitted Iraqis. On a year by year basis a greater portion of the funds can't be accounted for when it was under Paul Bremer's stewardship than when it was under the UN stewardship.
Yes, I know this is "off-topic". It is worth losing some karma to challenge the flawed reasoning of the parent post -- which, moderators, is just as off-topic.
Yes, yes, all well and good except that MS has been found guilty of using unfair business practices to maintain and extend their monopoly. Lotus Smartsuite and WordPerfect Office are effectivly DEAD due to the bundling issue. IMHO (and I'm not alone) MS should be forced to open the file formats to restore competition in the marketplace. How can wordperfect compete when MS was basically giving away the full office suite for $100 (as a bundle when you buy a PC loaded with Windows)?
The bottom line is that we (consumers, businesses, government) are all harmed when competition is eliminated in the marketplace. MS no longer charges $100 - it's $400 for the pro bundle now (now that the competition is gone) which is just a little less than non-bundled price. Lotus and WordPerfect could not compete with a $100 office suite. They Could compete with a $400 office suite, *if* the market were still competitive.
I need not say anything more.
Using proprietary formats just begs for trouble. Just think about this. Since parts of the Office XML files are encrypted, any reverse engineering to read them brings the DMCA into play. Its only a matter of time before M$ brings this gun out. That's why M$ refuses to fully document their Office formats. If open source software impinges on the Office revenue, M$ kills it off through the use of DMCA threats. The answer to this problem is simple. Don't use MS Office.
Quit playing Monopoly with Bill.
Linux - of the people, by the people, and for the people.
If you have an embedded bitmap, save the doc to HTML and you'll get a HTML file and jpegs. In older versions of Word, 97 I think, this seemed to be at the original resolution. Later ones downsampled and made it fairly useless for print. If you don't have 97, or the file won;t open in it, for Word 2000 I found this method: this method that requiues some scripting: