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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."
In reality there is no way MS will open up the .doc format. Lock-in for office file formats and the office products are central to MS's revenue scheme. The way to beat them is not to beg for them to open up their standard, but to create a better open standard backed by the community, one that is not layered in junk like the .doc standard is (why would you need to embed a video in a text document?). Then this standard could be supported by as many open source, and maybe even commercial projects as possible. With enough momentum we might be able to pull an adobe and create a format that is able to coexist popularly with the .doc format. It would be wonderful if MS would play nice; they don't have too, but we don't have to play their game either.
Philosophy.
What would the agreement do? The standard is either open or not (specification is published or withheld). Does it mean that any program that reads the file in this "open" format is bound by this agreement? I can see someone writting "Here, I sent you a powerpoint presentation and I also had to attach the 3 page agreement that you have to sign and send to Microsoft along with your name, date of birth, social security # and all your bank information. Then you can open and use my file. If you don't Bill Gates will come in person and take your firsborn child. Have a nice day, -Your dearest friend Jojo"
The problem is that importing .doc files into OO.org is a bit of a craps shoot, sometimes the document imports perfectly, other times it's usable but ugly, and sometimes it's so garbled as to be nearly useless. Not that I'm discounting the work done by the folks at OO.org or the other F/OSS projects that import .doc files (KWord usually does a pretty good job in my experience, and abiword tends to be all or nothing, though I haven't use abiword in a logn while, so it might be better now). .doc format has been pretty stationary for a while, the new format will still require time to reverse engineer (assume the authors won't or can't agree to whatever MS wants them to sign). I suspect that there will be a decent amount of time where the new format is the preferred windows document format, but importing/exporting for Linux applications isn't quite good enough. .docs for seemingly no reason. It aggravates me to no end how often clients and peopel from school send out emails with the text of the email in an attatched .doc file, when the content of the file is nothing more than plain text that could have simply been put in the email, or at least a plaintext file. .swx files? The merits of each file format aside, I generally save office documents as .swx, and it's a pita when I have to open up the file and export it to a .doc everytime I want to send it to someone. Since OO.org is GPL (IIRC), would allowing Office to import OO.org files mean that it would have to be GPL as well, or is it just microsoft trying to fruther their monopoly?
Of course, support is always improving, but that's because the
Of course, the real problem, IMO, has little to do with the format itself, but with how often people send
A bit off topic, but also, why the heck won't MS Office import OO.org
Famous Last Words: "hmm...wikipedia says it's edible"
So before I would sign, I would need to find a lawyer and pay a lot of money to find out what the implications of signing it would be. I would go through enormous hassle and a lot of money, just so I would have the honor and delight to look at MS' file format specification. But wait, I might go through all that hassle and expense and come up with some answers that I don't like, like finding out that the spec does contain trade secrets, or that I am agreeing to give MS injunctive relief, and if I find those thing out, I will have spent all that money and still I won't be able to look at the spec.
Or I could skip all of this nonsense and ignore whatever they are offering and just use one format which I know is truly open: OASIS. I don't need to sign anything, it doesn't contain any trade secrets, I don't need a lawyer, I don't need to spend any money, I am free to write whatever kind of software I want to based on it, I can do whatever I want with it, I don't have to pay, I don't have to worry about someone getting an injunction to shut me down if he thinks I did something wrong. Wow, when you look at it this way, what's there to even think about in making this decision?
What we really need is an OASIS plug-in for MS Office so that MS Office users can use the OASIS format without any hassles. That would be cool.
Wasn't there talk recently about making the OOo format into a ISO standard? Perhaps this is the way to go:
:-)
1) Make a good XML based ISO standard for textprocessors.
2) Try to convince governments/companies to require their sofware to be compliant with this standard.
3) And this is very important: Demand a very high and continued compatibility with this format to receive the "ISO approved" label. Or else we have another "IGES" debacle on our hands.
Managers and administrators just _love_ ISO standards and will at least frown if we can say: "Well M$ is not even ISO compliant, you will be in trouble in the future if you use that! It's not even compatible with the only existing ISO standard!!". This way M$ will have to coorporate to satisfy the very people that decide about buying their software...
Just a thought. Wouldn't know where to start to make this happen. But perhaps someone else here does
If MS Word could import and export .SXW files natively, there would be no need for MS Word in the first place. It's only the fact that Word -- and nothing else -- can read .DOC files properly, that keeps Microsoft selling it. If Word could import and export .SXW files, an organisation could keep just one PC with a copy of Windows and Office {plus OO.o export}, all the rest using OpenOffice.org, and use just this one machine for translating legacy documents.
.SXW files .....
Now, MS Word has a macro language -- a bastardised dialect of BASIC -- and a document object model {though not quite like the W3C ECMAscript one} that allows the canny programmer access to every feature of a document. And the code to synthesise and analyse SXW files is open source. It ought to be very possible for some third party to write a Microsoft Word plugin to do absolutely seamless import and export of OO.o
If I had a copy of Windows and a copy of Office, I'd be having a go myself. As it is, I got clean three years ago and don't intend to relapse anytime soon. Someone else can have the glory.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
I didn't read the license, but I'm sure it includes some sort of 'no reverse engineering' clause. Now here's the question: there are some countries out there where reverse engineering is allowed regardless of what the license says about it. Could someone from such a country possibly get the schema (legally), and then reverse engineer it to make a clean, Open re-implementation of it? And would it be legal to use it in e.g. US?