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."

Comments

Re:Feed me!

[realityfighter]

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.)

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 .doc encoder based on intelligent guesswork. If the standards were open, they could get compatability spot on.

Re:A better response to this

[Bert64]

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.

Re:Why shoud I have to sign...

[ajs318]

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.

Re:A better response to this

[molnarcs]

That's what is great about the new OpenOffice.org format. (trying to build it right now, fingers crossed). According to oo.o, it is not only supported by the community, but also the European Commission as well:

Beginning with version 2.0 OpenOffice.org uses the open standard OASIS OpenDocument XML format as the default file format. The OASIS OpenDocument format is a vendor and implementation independent file format, and thus guarantees freedom and independence. In addition to OpenOffice.org itself, the open source office suite KOffice as well as OpenOffice.org derivatives like the StarOffice software support the OASIS OpenDocument file format. The OASIS OpenDocument file format is also one of the file formats recommended by the European Commision. oo.o-2.0 feature-guide

Fileextensions:

• OpenDocument Text [.odt]
• OpenDocument Text [.odt]
• OpenDocument Text Template [.ott]
• OpenDocument Master Document [.odm]
• OpenDocument Spreadsheet [.ods]
• OpenDocument Spreadsheet Template [.ots]
• OpenDocument Drawing [.odg]
• OpenDocument Presentation [.odp]
• OpenDocument Chart [.odc]
• OpenDocument Database [.odb]

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).

Re:Feed me!

[AttilaSz]

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.