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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."
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.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
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!
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).
AFAIK there are talks about Abiword joining in, too.
Anyway, KOffice doing OASIS is great because it's much less bloated than OO.
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.
Sig erased via substitution of an identical one.
"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...
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?
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.