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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."
And opposing every one of them? This is like the US saying that it "protects everybodys interests by sitting on the UN" - and then using its veto for say - The International Criminal Court.
Just too scary.
You are able to do so, despite MS best efforts. People had to reverse engineer the doc format to get this accomplished.
So I don't really see your point. Just because people make great efforts to accomplish something that would be trivial if MS released the specs or adhered to an open standard, doesn't mean that MS is in the right, does it?
With Open Office, I can read and export every major Microsoft file in and out of OO.
How much more open do you want?
I want to be confident when I read and export Microsoft files from Open Office, when they reach their intended destination they'll actually still look the way they looked when I exported them.
I want to be confident about this without having to keep a copy of Word around to check to make sure I didn't somehow accidentally trigger some minor incompatibility with the spec that OO committed because they don't have the spec itself.
Because you want something that they have. They developed the file formats, so they own the intellectual property. If you want them to spell out how they work for you, you'll have to play by their rules. If you don't like that, that's fine too. You don't have to know now their file formats work to use their product, and when it comes down to it you don't even have to use their product.
This seems to me a lot like the BitKeeper debacle. It's all about contracts: the people who have something of value get to dictate the terms of the contract. No matter how much you complain about it and say "but file formats should be free!", that's not going to change.
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.
Isn't this basically the same as me agreeing to the terms of the GPL when I download GPLed source for a library or app that manipulates some open source document format? The only real difference is the terms of the agreement.
using namespace slashdot;
troll::post();
"I can read and export every major Microsoft file in and out of OO"
For now... wait until the next version of Office comes out... it isn't like formats can be reverse engineered overnight
While Microsoft is not going to fool a group of ol' beardy UNIX gurus, it can still fool the general public who aren't in key with how MS operates.
"Open Source" has become a bit of a buzzword these days. I figure that Microsoft reckons that it can ride on the open source wave by twisting the meaning to it's own benefit. Not too unlike their so-called "Open Licensing" or whatever-it-was initiative.
No MS. You can say it as many times as you like, but until you release Windows under an open source licence you will never be truly open. Charging money to see source code is not "open source".... so no, you can't play in our sandpit.
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
Notice how Microsoft successfully ended all use of the word "innovation" anywhere in the late 90s by their repeated abuse of it.
"Open" is next.
They've found that if you don't want to do something, it's totally sufficient to not do it and then repeat to the press over and over that you did it.
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.
The only problem she ran into was PDF. She was using it for her last semester and loved it's simplicity of use with OpenOffice. But then she ran into someone in her class who "couldn't open it in notepad". Avoiding my Nike Burns, Computer Guy, impressions I thought it best to just export to .doc format and leave it at that.
This is the third year that We've been using only OpenOffice on Linux. I've also shown a few others the use of OpenOffice on Windows and they have adopted it as well. As far as I'm concerned, at this point, Microsoft really doesn't have anything useful to add to a word processor. Wait, they might be able to add something, but it's not cost effective.
Dang. While Mr Microsoft was next door, I was sitting at the OpenOffice miniconf at LCA just 60 metres away. I wonder if he knew that the Forces For Good were gathered so close by.
I'm glad someone mentioned the NAA and the use of OOo. For the purposes of Digital Preservation, openly documented formats are essential. XML is good, but XML that you have to sign up for? C'mon Mr MS, who are you kidding?
At the NAA, we're about keeping records for long after we're all dead. Digital records *must* be stored in publicly documented formats. Your grandkids won't be keen to sign an agreement to use those records.
without MS you have no web/html like we have today ...something as innovative as, oh, computers? ...something as impressive as, oh, cooperation? None of these things are the result of a limited group of innovaters sealing themselves off. Why would the next wave of awesome innovation come from anywhere other than where it's come from before - openly communicating and sharing groups of people!
what, MS developed today's web/html? I thought Al Gore invented it! The only 2 things that we can credit MS with that we can't credit other people with are (1)a large percentage of the POPULARITY of the web (getting computers into homes) and (2)the freakish amount of broken html on the web. Don't dish out credit for existence to MS.
xml wouldn't get any attention if it wasn't "interwebby"
And this is a credit to MS's proprietary standing how?
this whole XML thing is a passing phase without MS
Then let it die in honor of better standards.
$diety forbid they avoid allowing open standards to stifle the innovation of their bazillion programmers with their bazillion dollars budgets.
(1)How do you figure that open standards would stifle innovation?
(2)If anyone's got a bazillion programmers it's not MS, it's the collective REST OF THE WORLD! Give them access and watch what all they come up with. It might just be something as cool as, oh, the web?
cat life | grep joy >> memory
Last time I checked, Microsoft are under no obligation to provide anyone with any details about their XML schema.
Despite the fact that you have to sign an agreement, this is certainly more "open" than a blanket rejection to everyone who requests access.
I can think of plenty of companies who won't let you get details about a file format they use under any circumstances.
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
1. Make references to GPL
2. Get moderated up
The only surefire way to get upmods on slashdot is to attack it. In particular, anything which attacks linux or the gpl is certain to get moderated up, because slashdot talks about the gpl so much that it seems it must be relevant to absolutely any subject, no matter what it is. Moderators will not hesitate to wonder whether the post has any relevance whatsoever to the article at hand, or whether it makes any points which would be lucid or important in any context other than slashdot; they will simply moderate up the first thing which speaks of a slashdot sacred cow in an accusatory manner.
They probably won't look the same, except in the most trivial cases. However you don't have that level of confidence if you use one version of Microsoft Office and send the document to a user with a different version of Microsoft Office, so you don't have much to lose by using OO.o instead.
Last time I checked, Microsoft are under no obligation to provide anyone with any details about their XML schema.
They're not, but then why not just stick with their binary format? Offering an XML-based file format (cabability) without supplying the schemas is not all that useful? You get the data, sure, but you could always export as plaintext for that.
Furthermore, it's certainly contrary to the basic idea and openess of the XML format, if you're gonna trap people with a patent license, trying to control how they parse the XML?
This is deceptive if you ask me.
zWhat would an EWOULDBLOCK block, if an EWOULDBLOCK could block would? -- me
"Why should I have to sign an agreement?" one audience member demanded to know.
Well that audience member is an idiot. The formats are as open as any other proprietory format, and more open than 99% of them. You can reverse-engineer your own files without a spec - just look at the XML. Or, if you want the complete IP delivered in a nutshell onto your lap, you have to sign an agreement.
Of course, none of this excuses the millions of idiots who use Word and then bitch that it's a closed format. But given those idiots exist, and given we can shut up people like this "why should I sign a piece of paper" guy, we can pretty much interoperate with Word now.
Microsoft, they're just so damned evil that even when they do something good, it's evil. Whereas Stallman releases a virus that infects font files and everyone says he's a hero.
"However, it was the proprietary standards that grew up and allowed those open standards to develop."
There are probably enough people out there who would heartly defend FOSS against such a statement against MS for a simple reason: FOSS was there about one&half decades before MS started to appear.
The other thing that bothers: We had to ask the question of whether to include backwards compatibility for that [OpenOffice.org] specification. Is just this simple to brush away odf as sucking too much to even care [at MS], and, funny thing, nobody objects to this ?
Microsoft promoted common development of standards by sitting on all of the representative bodies working on them
Just one quick example. MS also was in boards creating h.264. And now they have a closed implementation of something like it in wmv10. MS being in all of those boards in absolutely not about helping anyone: it's about being there where these happen, to know about them, to influence it towards they see it best, etc. Is there anyone who honestly believes MS is there to help ?
"why should I have my documents from government in a proprietary format and have to ask a third party for permission to open them?".
Quite true. In the sense, that if e.g. an official body picks a proprietary format to distribute documents, they implicitely force everyone else to use these, which in MS's case means either more pirates or more money.
I, personally, wouldn't like either of those.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
without MS you have no web/html like we have today
And without ignorant guys like you MS wouldn't have so much revenue.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
Your brain perhaps? Why rely solely on technology when you proofread something yourself?
Justin.
You're only jealous cos the little penguins are talking to me.
I think the gist the grandparent was trying to get across is that it is supposed to be a static text document for printing out, etc - a purpose which makes things like embedded music, video, etc obviously pointless. What the GP failed to take into account, however, was the fact that the Word format, like so many others, MS or otherwise, has been extended to do things far outside the scope for which they were originally created.
However, as Word is still primarily a letter- and other dead-tree-distribution tool, I do agree that it is a little silly to have embedded video, etc - The only reason we ever do it where I work is to sneak pr0n and music clips through the filters, which drop multimedia formats but let Word docs sail through. I've never seen anyone, geek or not, send me a Word document with an embedded video in for a purpose other than that - our PHB's are far more traditional, and do all their irritating all-singing, all-dancing multimedia eyesploder documents in PowerPoint anyway.
Dealing with lawyers would be a lot less tedious if they all looked like Casey Novak.
The problem is that many goverment institucions give info or documents in propietary formats, as microsoft word .doc files or excel tables. In that case if you wan't to read that you'll need to sing an agreetment with Microsoft, even if you are gona to export it to another format 5 secs after have opened it.
What part of that is Microsoft's problem? If your issue is gov's giving out info in MS DOC format the solution is not to punish Microsoft by forcing them to erode away part of their business, but rather to discuss with those gov's a more suitable format.
Talk about using a hammer to do a screwdriver's job....
If anything the extremists should be encouraging Microsoft to be as closed, proprietary and cumbersome as they can possibly get. They seem to be shooting themselves in the foot here by trying to cajole/convince Microsoft into playing along.
Seriously, if you're one of those folks who sees all proprietary software as a tool of Satan (says me, writing this in Opera), you don't want Satans reps on Earth to soften their image. You want them to instead impress people over and over again with their Black-Hatness so even the most clueless will eventually wake up and say "what the fuck?"
You *want* MS to lock people in - and then bend them over and ream them good and hard once the lock-in is established. That creates enormous ill-will, especially to the PHBs who don't like anyone messing with their kingdoms. When the next opportunity comes to jump ship, they'll be that much more inclined to do so (e.g., when the next full-scale upgrade and conversion takes place).
The harder they squeeze, the more star systems, er, customers, that'll slip through their grasp.
So fanatics, crusaders, and all you "information wants to be free" loons (who STILL won't send me your credit card numbers, you hypocrits), reevaluate your game plan here. You're doing your cause a disservice. Every time MS screws over a customer pat them on the back and say "good job!"
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
"Plus any boss who fiddles with Linux for a bit isn't going to take long before concluding Linux is retarded because you can't embed video in docs like you can in Word."
I don't understand how you get from "Linux", an Operating System, to "Word", an Application, and compare the two as if they are equivalent.
But it's clear that you haven't even used OpenOffice, and probably have not even used a well-configured Linux system. Like anything else, it's a bitch to configure from scratch (a little easier than Windows XP, with the right distro), but once that's done, there's really very little in the application space that's not covered. Including "embedded media in documents".
The things that are lacking, tend to be due to legal restrictions (such as certain unsupported media codecs, or DVD playback, or driver support for certain hardware). But plenty of stuff does work, and works well, for those who bother to use it.
It's not clear to me why the "Average PHB" would be using a personal computer in the first place, much less running Linux (or even Windows, for that matter).
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
I am all for banning smoking at any public place and also in private apartments when it can be demonstrated that it can be smelled in neighbouring apartments.
A printed document is a different thing than a Hypertext document. The grandparent post is right: there should be no need to embedd a video in a document that is to be printed, i.e. used as a book, as written documentation.
On the other hand, you are also correct, but what you are referring to are not paper documents, but hypertext documents. Hypertext documents should be able to have anything in them, because their sole purpose is to pass information around through computers.
The difference between paper and on-screen documents is what caused your disagreement. Software vendors like Microsoft have either failed to realise this difference, or they deliberately ignored it in order to lock-in their customers.
Lock-in for office file formats and the office products are central to MS's revenue scheme
... yes ... that'll be why Office currently exports all its metadata into XML for you, just to make it really hard to figure out their closed formats.
...
.doc so your first proposal is to remove functionality. The reason you want to remove it is because - and this is classic OSS - you don't see the need for it. It's only dogma that tells you that a "text" format doesn't need support for video. You obviously don't see a hundred million different Word users with a hundred million different uses for Word. Instead you see a chance to push the UNIX philosophy down people's throats. This is classic flawed OSS thinking. You can't replace the .doc format until you understand what people use it for. This isn't Microsoft's game, this is the end-users' game, and you do have to play it, if you want to be taken seriously by end-users.
Er
we don't have to play their game either
Yes, and they don't have to play yours
why would you need to embed a video in a text document?
See, this is the sort of closed-minded thinking that ensures Microsoft will always win out. You want to create a rival format to
Also, if you understand the basic design of Windows and COM, the question becomes not "why would you need to embed a video file in a text document" but "why would any sane developer want to prevent someone from doing that when a component-based architecture makes it so easy?"
"No one has been forced out of the market here and Microsoft is quite within its rights not to open up the document format."
Huh? What about WordPerfect? Lotus SmartSuite? They have certainly been forced out of the market for all practical purposes.
Every review I have ever seen of any non-Office office suite considers the ability to read and write Office files an absolute must. Microsoft is a convicted monopolist. The courts did not order them to open up document formats, but they absolutely could have.
Furthermore, governments are completely within their rights to prohibit use of file formats that are not open, and I hope they do so. MS can make all they noise they want about "open enough", but the AU government should just tell them "fine, have it your way, but we will no longer use any of your products, and will not accept files in proprietary MS formats from government contractors".
At an 'Open Soure in Government' conference, the only mention of Open Source was to say that it wasn't the same as Open Standards.
The main thrust of his presentation was to argue that standards (whether open or closed) were more important as long as one could licence the IP on reasonable and non-discriminatory terms.
Rest of the conference was good.
Why on earth should MS have to make it easy for someone else to rip off their work?
Why should Microsoft have the right to lock up my documents and not tell me how to get my document complete with formatting from their program?
What gives them the right to treat my work in that way after I have already paid them?
I believe that companies should be allowed to take whatever measures they deem neccessary to prevent piracy and reverse-engineering of their software as long as it doesn't hurt customers.
I'm happy to pay for, and use proprietary software, but that does not mean that I want some company to tell me with what software I can open my own data.
Microsoft Word was originally intended, surprisingly enough, to be a word processor, not a multimedia authoring application.
Many users actually just want to be able to write letters/reports/CVs/theses. In my experience it's only competent computer users who tend to embed external objects in a DOC file. So perhaps Microsoft should actually address "what the users want", and not merely insist on adding new extraneous features so as to justify the cost of the next edition of office.
It's not about embedding music and videos, it's about embedding _anything_ whatsoever. Some of which _are_ valid things to have in a document.
E.g., surprise, I might want to embed a CAD drawing as an illustration in a document. E.g., I might have a map generated out of sattellite data, by a specialized program. E.g., I might have a scientiffic/simulation program which can present its data or results in its own format, and I might want to embed that in a document. Etc.
"Text document" no longer means 80 column, 7 bit ASCII, you know. If an illustration or diagram actually belongs in that text, I'd very much like it to be actually included there, and not just referenced as "oh, and you also need to look at asdfgh666.jpg in the attached pics.zip file." Stopping to do that not only is a waste of my time, it also pointlessly disrupts the reading process.
Yes, one could do the stone-age thing and do a piss-poor export to some graphics format first, and then embed that. And pray to the dark gods that you don't end with some piss-poor conversion and/or scaling artefacts when printing. Just like in the bad old days.
Or you could have a modern design which can spare you that waste of money, brains and time. Microsoft obviously took this route. Kudos to them.
So, no offense, the "why would you need to embed a video in a text document?" is just a straw man, and not even a good one.
Again: The point is to have an architecture which can embed anything whatsoever, from any program. Incidentally something that generic is also usable to embed videos. But it's also able to embed stuff that _is_ perfectly normal and logical to have in a text document. Which is the real point.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
1. You use their software voluntarily for storing *your* data.
2. Your data is - and remains - perfectly accessible via the software they provide, that you voluntarily purchased to use
I'm happy to pay for, and use proprietary software, but that does not mean that I want some company to tell me with what software I can open my own data.
They don't.
If you're going to use stupid analogies to push an off-topic political point, try telling the truth:
- Strawman A: The USA "protects everybodys interests by sitting on the UN". Where has the USA said this exactly? Do you have a clear citation of this phrase in an official document or are you just blowing smoke?
- Strawman B: "and then using it's veto". Which veto would that be? The U.N. security council veto? More smoke: The USA has never used it's veto on the world court. It has terminated it's consent to surrender it's sovereignty to the world court.
When countries like Libya can become chairman of the U.N.'s Human rights committee the USA recognizes that the international burocracies are being perverted from their initial aims. Why should the world court be any different?
Democracy is a sheep and two wolves deciding what to have for lunch. Freedom is a well armed sheep contesting the issue
As a user why should I care about the difference? I'm making a document to send to someone, I should use a document editor. I don't care about what sort of document it is, I shouldn't need to know. I just create the document and distribute it in the most appropriate way. If its got video in then I know that it won't print very well but I understand that. Why should I have to create two types of document based on the distribution medium?
You may think me a tired, old, cynic. I'd have to disagree about the tired bit.
Nothing illegal in keepin file formats proprietary. On the contrary there could be at least something illegal in reverse engineering them - whether do you like it or not. M$ has some very illegal things to destroy competition, this is not one of them. If this is a problem it's only because people are using the wrong format to share documents - doc files are not written on that purpose.
Dude, you obviously missed all the studies showing that the TCO for Windows is lower than that for Linux, if. . .
.but wear earplugs and this experiment is not suitable for children.
you've got a room full of lawyers who'll work for a two litre bottle of Mountain Dew and a bag of Doritos now and then.
And nothing drives up the TCO like a BSA audit, even if they find you in full compliance. God help you if you unintentionally slipped up somewhere.
Just ask someone in the city hall of Virginia Beach about this. .
In a shop with just three people doing your best to insure license compliance can run into the thousands per year, and you'll likely fail anyway (Google on "Three body problem").
Funny how the studies of TCO never include the concurrent and absolutely necessary legal expenses of contracting with (or even simply clicking on a EULA) Microsoft, nevermind the equally necessary costs of trying to insure compliance with the contract and/or license over time.
So, does your company have a viable policy for maintaining contract/license compliance? If a a tech does not routinely check your box for unlicensed software the answer is most likely "No."
Has your company insured itself against/budgeted for a BSA audit? Oh. Dudes. You are soooooooooooo fucked.
Here, have a copy of a POSIX compliant OS, with included office suite, I downloaded from the internet. Feel free to make as many copies as you like and install them on as many machines as you like, and so long as you don't alter the source code (included) and restribute outside your legal entity you may feel free to treat it as if it were in the public domain.
Total legal expenses incured so far, and to be incured in the future for compliance, el zippo; and you don't have to sign diddely squat. Now let's total up those TCO figures again.
If, in future, someone comes up with evidence that you are already not in compliance with the GPL you may get a call from the FSF, but these boys are actually rather nice, if you're not intentionally being a dick, and much nicer than the BSA even if you are.
If nothing else they have to be, because you have signed diddely squat.
KFG
It's a fallacy to assume that Word can open .DOC files perfectly. It doesn't. Do you have any idea how many .DOC formats have been created over the years? There are rules governing what versions will open which version .DOC and when you're given a random floppy to open with a random version of Word - cross your fingers. Then there's the international incompatibilities... And don't get me started on Works!
.DOC isn't 'all that'. OASIS is a MUCH more open and stable format, and will be for years to come.
I wish a mainstream reporter would investigate this so that businesses can understand that
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
"I still don't see how were they illegaly forced out of the markets."
;). This was also illegal.
The marketplace success of MS Office had little to do with the performance of the product. It had everything to do with:
1. Withholding the Win32 programming interface from competitors as long as possible prior to the launch of Windows 95 (i.e until Office95 was nearly completed) so that they could advertise that only Office had 32-bit apps. This is a classic example of using a monopoly in one field (Windows) to obtain a monopoly in another field (office productivity software). This is unequivocally illegal under U.S. antitrust law.
2. Bundling agreements to get as many PCs as possible pre-loaded with Office, particularly for business use. These agreements contained strong financial incentives (in the form of discounts on Windows licensing) for offering consumers only Microsoft products and not any competing software (believe me, I know, sayeth the AC
3. Obfuscated and changing file formats that ensured that competing products would not be able to read the latest versions of Office files. Once MS killed off all of the competition, this tactic lost momentum, because MS was largely competing against older versions of their own software, and people became worried that upgrading to newer versions would make their older PCs (running Office 97, for example) unable to interchange files with newer computers. This tactic is not inherently illegal, as far as I know, but it could have been legitimately prohibited as part of a remedy after Microsoft's antitrust conviction, and (to get back on topic) is clearly something that could legitimately be prohibited in government specifications for acceptable software.
So, yes, my idea of "free and fair competition" allows one company to attempt to "outperform/outmarket" another, but only if they obey the law. Microsoft did not obey the law.
"Why should I have to sign an agreement?" one audience member demanded to know.
If I were the guy on stage, I would be very tempted to reply with "Why should we open this up to you anyway?"
Some people expect a lot- for nothing.
It is amazing who you meet when you do something 'for the public.' I run a totally-free, totally-unsponsored web app. It is a combination calendaring/weight and exercise tracking/reminder/organizer/bulletin board. Think Weight Watchers on-line for free - with a calendar.
It is surprising how often people send me things like - "I won't use your system until you do xxx" or more commonly "I DEMAND that you make the following changes or we will stop using your system."
That is why I went from being an involved host, to being the guy who is seen as a dis-interested developer. The moment you show interest, there will be a bunch of people (about 5% as far as I can tell) who feel that it is their god-given right to demand that everything works exactly the way they want it to. And instead of just going away, they do things like organize a boycott, and post hundreds of messages in the bulletin board complaining about the perceived problems.
What the complainers don't realize, is that they only make up a small percentage of the users, and the other 95% use the system and are fairly happy. Of course there were other people who were un-happy, and they moved on- possibly to Weight Watchers, where they are paying $200/year- of COURSE it is better, I am sure they have more than one developer.
So- I am not saying that Microsoft should, or should not open up their system more. I am just saying that there is always at least ONE jackass out there who feels that the world owes them everything, just for the honor of having the jackass use their software.
No reason to lie.
OpenDocument is being supported and encouraged within the EU. It will also be supported in OpenOffice 2.0, which is due out soon. The beta for OOo 2 is out already for testing.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
He didn't say it was the way to go. In fact, quite teh opposite, he advocated alternative open source software. What he said was that he didn't advocate reverse engineering closed source software. He went on to say that a company has a reason for closing the software down and it's no right to crack it just because we can. But he certainly never said he was in support of closed source software.
Is it just me, or didn't Word have great import filters once upon a time? You know, back before Word was defacto standard?
Yes, it did, back when Word had to compete tooth and nail with other products that were already established in the marketplace.
Yes, MS can make good products with compelling features - if they are in a competitive marketplace.
Once they dominate the market, though, there is no need to create what the user wants, just the need to lock-in users tighter to what they are already using.
Exactly the same business model is seen with Internet Explorer which accumulated many great features while Netscape was a competitor and which stagnated with some non-W3C-standard, MS-exclusive behavior after Netscape's coffin was nailed.
It would be better for everybody except current large shareholders of MS if the talent at Microsoft were redirected to what they are quite capable of doing: creating good products in a competitive marketplace. It's a tragedy for consumers and for MS programmers that they have to exist in a monopoly situation where the best business decisions are to build barriers to prevent users from moving to something different.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
I've heard this argument ..... that Word is so powerful ..... but every time I come close to believing it, I find evidence of a document with about fifteen different fonts in it, formatted using spaces, and a manually-entered table of contents.
.....
I just think some people can't handle anything more complicated than a fountain pen
{and I write perl scripts to interface with mySQL databases for mail merging, because I can do that.}
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
So- I am not saying that Microsoft should, or should not open up their system more. I am just saying that there is always at least ONE jackass out there who feels that the world owes them everything, just for the honor of having the jackass use their software.
You're extrapolating your experiences and applying them to Microsoft. Unfortunately you are failing to account for the fact that Microsoft does not behave the same way you do. First they are a monopoly convicted of abusing that monopoly position to illegally crush competitors and force both behaviors and financial penalties upon their customers. The fact that the government has not mandated open formats from MS is a clear indication of just how corrupt they are.
Users deserve an alternative to being locked in by a monopoly and if someone feels like yelling that at a representative of these criminals, I'm all for it.
Is it just me, or is this argument kindof like asking Ford to ensure I can stick a Chevy starter in the engine and have it still work.
Why, oh why, didn't I take the Blue Pill?
Invariably 90% of them have never paid for their copy of it believing themselves to be under the Microsoft "I use it at work so I can install it on 12 PCs at home" Licence or the Microsoft "My mate gets the MSDN CDs and he's allowed to let anyone else use them" License.
I wonder how many of the same people would be so vocal if they had to shell out £200 for a copy?
Me? I use OpenOffice and can save my pennies for 100 pints of fine English real ale while sleeping soundly and night knowing I'm not contributing to Bill and Melinda's sorrow at being unable to afford a new extension this year due to all those "naughty little Office pirates".
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
I think the problem here is not whether or not the OS community can come up with a 'better' document or a comprehensive office platform to create, edit, and view said documents, but whether the OS community can come up with ONE and ONLY ONE 'better' document.
One of the recurring principles of the OS community holds them back in mainstream competition of 'universal formats'. The principle? Choice.
The pattern is already evident in which text editor people consider to be the best for one reason or another, or Linux distro, or network sniffing tool... the list goes on and on. This is not to say that any of these tools are bad tools, but there's not a universal set of 'official' tools to use. The same could be said with the proposition of competing with MS file formats. I guarantee you that if anyone cited a specific file format as being a candidate for competing, there would be at least 5 other people representing significant populations of the OS community saying that their favorite file format would be a better candidate for X or Y reason.
The bottom line is, who among the OS community is going to have the authority to decide which format will be the competing candidate? The instant such a person / body of people is determined they will have to put themselves in the same position that MS is in. Controlling the file format's capabilities, along with the capabilities of applications using said file format, would be a necessity in order for it to be a standard format and application. Sure it might be 'open-source' and open format, but without ONE tool that does it all on that ONE format... it simply won't compete.
And lets not kid ourselves here. The vast majority of people who would like to compete with the MS formats would not be satisfied with simply coexisting with it at some level. It would have to be a near complete replacement of the format to be of any use. Why? The same reason that people have so many problems trying to communicate via docs nowadays. If there's two types of documents and person A uses doc X and person B uses doc Y and there's no real conversion between the two...
No, it would have to be a landslide replacement of the format. Competing on the operating system level is a whole different ballgame than competing on the file format level. With an OpSys you can use it for countless things under countless configurations. With a file format you have but a single purpose... create a document to communicate to others with. There's not really room for 'multiple alternatives' here, especially because of the nature of a document. If the person you're trying to communicate with cannot read it, then the existence of such a document is moot.
So then how do you go about doing this? Simple. Ignore its existence and create a file format and office suite that doesn't do any doc importing or exporting whatsoever. Then stop using Office altogether and request that employees who send you doc files to use X piece of software instead since you can't read what they gave you. And of course it would have to be a somewhat globally orchestrated effort. They'd all be pissed... and management especially, because these people don't like change being imposed on them even if it costs nothing.
Which brings me to my final point? Who are we to impose change on everyone else simply because we thing our solution is better... even if it IS better? By doing so we become what we hate by doing what our enemy does, but at the opposite spectrum. And then once we've gained market dominance we begin to impose adherence to our standard just as MS currently does. Even if such software was 'free' we'd be charging people their soul just as MS does now.
Let's face it. The very principles that define who we are prevent us from succeeding at such an effort. To do so would be paradox.
Just how would anyone think they could make this claim is beyond me. That would be like, say, Grumbacher claiming that someone's painting is a derived work because they used their paints and/or brushes.
Stop the insanity!
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It is not the idea that is bad it is the fear that if the idea is comming from a big corporation, especially Microsoft (the least "open" software company) then it probably doesn't mean what it seems to mean on the surface and is PR hype, marketing or just "dust in the eyes" type thing. Remember the Blockbuster "no late fees." it doesn't matter that it sounded ridiculous and unreal and people should have read the fine print, the problem is that the marketing was designed to trick and lie people and I don't think MS is better than that.
How is this holding your data hostage again? You chose to use Word, your friend didn't. You redily admit that there are ways around it but you don't want to use them. Isn't this your fault for choosing something to to a group project in that not all members of the group have access to?
I'm working on a database with a group for a school project, I decided to use Oracle. The group meeting is at another member's house to work on it. We want to make edits to the database, but he doen't have a version of Oracle. What now? Sure, I can dump it to one of several cross platform formats but thats a lot of work I don't want to do. When will Oracle open their file format so I don't have to do anything?
Same whining, different product. Yet Microsoft, and around here often only Microsoft, is expected to open everything up so that people can make a complete replacement.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."