Slashdot Mirror
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."
Just look at IE.
Can one piece of software possibly be more open to exploits and viruses?
"Why should I have to sign an agreement?"
So Microsoft can own your soul, your offsprings' souls, their retroactive grandparents' souls, and the souls of everyone they come in contact with.
In the form of a nice law suit.
Ok can someone explain this to me.
With Open Office, I can read and export every major Microsoft file in and out of OO.
How much more open do you want?
If you want to make applications which use MS file formats, Open Office code is freely available (open source no?) so whats stopping people from developing ?
-SJ53
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.
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.
No use being Anonymous Coward. You used IE, and they know it now.
hilarious
You'll still be completely and totally unable to use Word files in non-Microsoft applications, except in a buggy and incomplete reverse engineered form.
But that's open enough to suit Microsoft perfectly fine.
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?
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.
XML, RTF and TXT are not closed, basically they can be open with most text editor. .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. :D
The problem is that many goverment institucions give info or documents in propietary formats, as microsoft word
BTW: XML itself is not a format
>Linux is not user-friendly.
It _is_ user-friendly. It is not ignorant-friendly and idiot-friendly.
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();
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
Given the current state of this vast intar-web, I'm inclined to think that not having web/html like we have today isn't necessarily a bad thing.
Ask Linus. Proprietary is the way to go.
And you all knew this was coming.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.
Earlier I posted on how today Microsoft had declared beta software as ready for production, and how root is apparently completely safe. Microsoft calling themselves open source enough just takes the cake though.
our customers are also opened enough....we only have to give them a litle more vaseline to maximize the opening
you'll need to sing an agreetment with Microsoft
Swaaaaannieeee - ohhhhhh how I love ya, how I love ya, Swaaaannnniiiiiieeeeeeeee!
Oh you meant "sign" an agreement... my bad. please spellcheck in the future,
plskthx
AC
...would mean (for me) that the XML schemas would be available publicly over the net. The benefits for all application developers, using MS file formats, would be huge. Say you have a web service and need to receive Office files from whatever clients you have. If the schemas would be directly available through a URL, you could use wichever parser suits you best and check the files for correctness (ie. do they contain the information you need). The possibilities would be enormous.
Lemon curry???
I thought man was talking on malware authoring conference.
839*929
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"
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.
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.
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.
Unless I missed it, the article doesn't say what type of agreement it is they would have to sign, or what terms there are.
I'm guessing some sort of NDA-ish, so you don't go publishing the spec all over the place. Which, in the case of a file format, is exactly what I would consider "open source". A freely avaliable spec.
Well, I suppose it still might be free(as in no money) even with signing the agreement, just not easily avaliable.
"That's some catch, that Catch 22." "It's the best there is."
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.
Could you please point me to the spellchecker that would correct sing to sign based on the context?
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
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.
Root is safe, beta is gold, MS is open enough and MN2004 is coming back on a corrected trajectory. All makes sense.
M$, for some people, will never be open enough, but has this affected integration with M$ and Open source programs, if anything I've noticed Open Office is better at back compatibility with old word documents than Word itself.
And As for "They'll never be truely be open until they open source windows". Why should they? Sure some people think all software should be free, but some people like to be rewarded in megabucks for there software, and if its worth it sure. This is, of course, ignoring that windows is not worth its current price even if it isn't worthless.
"I may be full of crap about this game, and I may be wrong, and that's fine." -Jack Thompson
"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.
Except: you are forgetting that Microsoft is clearly a monopoly and has been legally recognized as such.
For various reasons having to do the meaning of "free market", monopolies are generally required to be more open than random companies like BitMover.
At least when the anti-trust laws are enforced they are.
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?
and I also believe all politicians are honest and truthful
Justin.
You're only jealous cos the little penguins are talking to me.
RTF is proprietary, but MS has the specs online and easily available.
; en-us;86999
.exe they offer you as a download is a self-extracting .zip ... un-zip tools work fine, you don't need to actually execute it if you want.
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb
The
Heck, the license info in the document isn't even terrible... it's almost... open.
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....
Free as in costs money
Advantage as in same thing later
We are proud to present
Open as in closed
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
Spellchecking doesn't have to be done entirely by computer :)
Never mind Spamassassin. When's Spammerassassin coming out?
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?
I thought all MS software where open..!?! Guess i'll have to go close windows to prevent bugs flying inn...
Bits of News Giving you the latest bits.
Because Microsoft are illegally enforcing a monopoly by forcing others out of the market (not allowing other products/projects to play along)
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
The issue is that governments are generally clueless about IT. Come to think of it, governments tend to be clueless, full stop.
The solution is to ban proprietary document formats -- or render them unworkable in practice, perhaps by enshrining in law any interested party's right to carry out reverse-engineering for the purpose of creating interoperable software.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
I'm not an XML expert and I don't know what Microsoft are trying to do that XML will not accommodate, but, does this not point to a deficiency in the current XML standard? If it does, then wouldn't it be to the benefit of everybody to update the XML standard?
Of course, that does not mean that Microsoft will, or should, use that or any other standard. It is their right to do just what the hell they want. Just like the Open Source people.
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I - I took the one less travelled by. (Robert Frost, 1916)
definition of spellcheck
Spellcheck actually means using a computerised spellchecker.
my grandparent's postis flamebait? C'mon!
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?
I'd say they are _gaping_ open!
Yup, just occured: 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. - was he invited ? wanted to go ? MS wanted someone to be there ? what's the story ?
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
If that were to be the case, the whole BitKeeper fracas would never of happened...
If I point out that you are incorrect, making me a foe does not make you any more correct.
You lot just love to whinge don't you?
You've just been given an other option - this is a good thing. Whether you're going to take it or not is entirely up to you, but if you're going to get your knickers in this much of a twist over it, I suggest you pretend none of this ever happened.
Your ignorance will be my bliss.
Rtf is an open as in freely published standard. It's controlled by MS, but anyone can implement it, like pdf and adobe.
I am trolling
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.
Running as root is safe, beta is good for production use and MS is open enough. Next thing you know, they'll be saying that Adobe bought Macromedia, one of its enemies.
Of course Microsoft thinks they're open enougth, they still profit!
When OpenOffice.org stand a real menace, then Microsoft will be pressed to open their format, or to support OO.o own.
OpenOffice.org 2.0 is comming, with database support and a REAL laguage to extend it, Java. Let's see how it stands against Microsoft Office.
---- You know how some doctors have the Messiah complex - they need to save the world? You've got the "Rubik's" complex
"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...
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 agreed to it in cort.
Nobody else has any issues with publishing the file formats they create.
For most people portability is important.
Costummers don't wish to be locked into a product line if they can avoid it.
They have the ability to bundle Microsoft office and Windows together. More and more PCs are being shipped with Office preinstalled as part of a pacage deal.
You mentioned rabid supporters. Intresting but every give a thought why Linux has so many supporters and Windows dosen't?
Or why Macintosh has so many rabid supporters?
Oh heck I mean the Amiga has more supporters that Microsoft Windows.
Why would a long dead platform have more supporters than the most widely used?
If your product is good you get fanatics. If your product sucks you complain about other peoples fanatics.
I don't actually exist.
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.
So your idea of free and fair competition is that every product should float no matter if another product completely outperforms/outmarkets them? I still don't see how were they illegaly forced out of the markets.
The owls are not what they seem
The solution I see is the reverse of what most people think: Create an OOo import/export plugin for word! Then you can push the OOo fileformat and not necessarily the program.
I would have thought that the "market" would be more accurately defined as "word processors" or "office suites", not "Microsft Word files" or "Microsoft Excel files"...
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.
The problem that I have with this is that these required agreements are, more often than not, absolutely one-sided and presented as non-negotiable.
Even if the proposed agreements are legally dubious when considering the requirements they place upon the reader, it's unrealistic for most potential readers to challenge Microsoft and expect to get anywhere, let along negotiate.
Thanks!
Never mind Spamassassin. When's Spammerassassin coming out?
'You use our software, we own your data. It's that easy -- deal with it.'
OS Software is like love: The best way to make it grow is to give it away.
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
People like you make me sick.
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.
Because Microsoft are illegally enforcing a monopoly by forcing others out of the market (not allowing other products/projects to play along)
/. Let's pick a stance and not change it based on what company the stance is applied to.
Yet when Apple sues online web sites over other people violating NDA's (you know - Signed agreements) It's good business practice.
Sheesh.
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
>> . Intresting but every give a thought why Linux has so many supporters and Windows dosen't?
May I hazard the hypothesis that Windows fans simply don't read/post on slashdot all day long ?
And may I suggest that 99% of users could care less of the OS they are using ?
It's true that I can access my data in the short term, but in the future I may wish to change to a different office suite or hardware platform or OS for a very good reason.
At that point I will no longer be able to access my data with all it's formatting, because Microsoft are keeping the standard secret, why should I have to worry about that? It benefits nobody except Microsoft to have the standards kept secret.
If you were talking about releasing Microsoft's source code, I could understand your viewpoint with regard to them doing all the work for someone else to reap all the benefits, but we're simply talking about Microsoft releasing information about whatever obfuscated format they're storing their customer's data in.
Is that really too much to ask?
...my wife is sort of pregnant.
you dont know my opinion of apple suing people over violating NDA's (not that its at all relevant).
Apple aren't a monopoly, different rules apply.
I think I'm gonna not come here for a few months.
Good. I never liked that Anonymous Coward guy anyway......
The word processor could quite well embed the image at printing quality for you.
This post written under Gentoo-linux with an SCO IP license.
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..."
May I hazard the hypothesis that Windows fans simply don't read/post on slashdot all day long ?
Yes you may, and I'd also agree.
And may I suggest that 99% of users could care less of the OS they are using ?
Once again, yes you may. I'd agree here too, but I'd say more like 90% or so.
You'll STILL have the version of MS Office you voluntarily chose to use, which will STILL be able to open the documents.
Assuming it's not Office XP after they've switched off the registration servers, of course...
I don't know what kind of documents you've been importing and exporting. Every time I've tried using OO at work, it has proven incapable of importing even the simplest two-column A4-sized manuscript with a couple of figures, equations and captions in it
Word figure and equation support is screwed anyway IMO. It's sometimes near-impossible to get the figures where you want them (you drag them onto the next page and they bounce back - this might've been fixed since 2000) and equations are some horrid OLE thing that crashes half the time.
"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.
I don't think you're quite 'getting it', I'd like to be able to retrieve my documents as I saved them, without losing formatting, and especially without losing the tables and illustrations.
Which format can you suggest that stores all of the formatting that word is capable of?
All the export formats are poor relations, and the original formatting is inaccessible due to Microsoft's restrictive practices.
Regardless of whether I'm using Microsoft's product voluntarily or not should not give them the right to restrict information that I have stored using their software.
I'm sure plenty of people have started using Microsoft's products without being aware that they are essentially chaining themselves to MS Office forever more, why should this be something that paying customers even have to consider?
But I like the ones on our side better. Maybe because they're looking after the public good rather than their own pockets. Besides, we have the better technology.
It's spelled "hypocrite", by the way.
you had me at #!
A: You don't have to.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
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.
I don't RTFA. I use RTF.
Say hello to my little sig.
What do you mean it isn't a monopoly. Can I get a powermac clone which is fully compatible with Apple's powermac? No. Apple is a completely closed monopoly, in many ways even worse than Microsoft.
I will freely admit that MS outmarkets almost anyone (beer and soda market even better, but that's pretty much it).
WordPerfect 8 still outperforms all versions of MS Word, including current ones. (Though I have no idea if current versions of WP are any good.)
I also can't deny that mis-management at WP helped MS squish them, but MS wasn't entirely honest in their dealings with WP either.
Exam 4/C again. Maybe I'll do better this time.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Goatse is more open than Microsoft
My other sig is crap too
...until you run into all these people who insist on MS Word format documents.
I ran into this problem last year when sending out copies of my resume. It was all nicely formatted in OO.o, and it exported perfectly to PDF. "Great!", I think, and start submitting it to various companies and web sites. It was then I discovered that many places won't accept anything that's not a Word document, so I was forced to re-export the OO.o doc in Word format. I then checked the output in Word to check everything was OK. What a complete mess! It was mostly readable, but it didn't exactly give the first impression I was hoping for. I think I tried fixing up the output in MS Word, as well as a few PDF->Word convertors, but I think the best results were when I took the plain text from OO.o and reformatted it by hand in Word. Groovy.
The problem's not really with OO.o, of course, it's the monkeys running the HR depts and recruitment sites (*cough*monster*cough*) who insist on having Word docs. I tried reasoning with a few that PDF wasn't a bad alternative, although mostly this was met with the email equivalent of blank stares and "Yeah, we need MS Word format".
While this situation persists it would be nice if the MS Word format was opened to allow OO.o to export reliably. Which would then prolong the insistance on using Word format documents in the first place, which is probably bad... oh god, it's depressing...
Besides, I thought that most word processors this side of the 1980's were supposed to be WYSIWYG, OO.o and MS Word included? Not "What You See Is Something Almost, But Not Entirely, Unlike The Thing You're Going To Export" - WYSISABNEUTTYGTE??
What do you mean it isn't a monopoly. Can I get a powermac clone which is fully compatible with Apple's powermac? No. Apple is a completely closed monopoly, in many ways even worse than Microsoft.
I don't think you understand the definition of "monopoly". A monopoly controls an industry, the industry MS controls being operating systems. PowerMacs aren't an industry, they are a brand of computer.
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?
Why the hell are you still using MS software and formats?
Switch.
Or perhaps he objects to there being such a distinction, legal or otherwise. Personally I would have to agree with him. The government has no place telling me whether or not my private property is a public place or not. As for smoking in "public" restaurants let the market decide. I vote with my wallet. I dislike smelling cig smoke when I eat so I don't patronize places that have it. Simple.
If you see spelling or grammatical errors don't blame me. I tried to preview but IE here at work borked the CSS
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.
I was going to mod you down for trolling, but I'd rather set the record straight.
There is clearly more to new versions of Word than being able to open previous versions' documents. If there weren't, then far more businesses would have given up upgrading by now. The average home user may not use all (or perhaps even any) of the new features, particularly in the most recent incarnations where they've been heavily focussed on interoperability with other Office apps, but many business users do.
Even without the new features, Word remains a far more powerful tool than OpenOffice.org Writer (and I say this as someone who works with both apps regularly, on a wide range of document types). OO.o has enormous potential, and I'm grateful to the dev team for giving me such a useful product that I can install for free at home, but let's keep some perspective. I can't think of any significant area where Writer actually beats Word yet. In contrast, Writer lags behind Word enormously in usability, in robustness and, for some features, in power as well.
In other words, what keeps Microsoft selling Word is the fact that Word remains by far the best word processing software available for Windows. (Mac users might like to try Apple's Pages.) In time, the competition may catch up, but if users do migrate, it won't be just because someone worked out how to convert reliably between .doc and .sxw files.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
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? They don't "lock up" your data. You're perfectly free to open it and modify it using the application you purchased. I can't believe someone can be this naive. But in case you are, they provide a "Save As" feature where you can save it in an open format if you want.
Code to live, live to code.
I do that all the time, moving data from MSSQL server to mysql.
I use JDBC, an open standard, but I could use a SQL dump, another standard, to get the data out.
Games are different. It's not _my_ data. Maybe it would be nice to be able to dump/backup PS2 memory cards for statistics, but then it would be even easier to cheat, and games would be more boring.
It sounds to me like you should choose to use .sxw files. After all, it is your choice.
If you're going to give me some bullshit about society forcing you to make a choice, well that's bullshit. Peer presure was never an excuse. You are a human being with the ability to freely decide weither to use Office or not. Decide against it. Take the penality and hardships that come with deciding against it, or shut the fuck up, Donny.
MS doesn't control an industry. They just have more customers. Nothing prevents those customers from switching. In fact they are "switching" even as we speak. Linux, Apple, *BSD's. All of them exist and have no enormous barriers to entry. Just let the Market do it's work. It works slower perhaps than legislation but it also works in a more stable fashion with less headaches. Legislating this kind of thing is like using a sledgehammer to to nail a board. You'll probably break the board instead.
If you see spelling or grammatical errors don't blame me. I tried to preview but IE here at work borked the CSS
You made a free and voluntary choice to use word with your eyes wide open. You still have options: use some other software. You have free choice and total control in today's world.
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?
Because they can?
What gives them the right to treat my work in that way after I have already paid them?
They aren't doing anything with your work.
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.
How is this hurting you? If you were that concerned about it, you'd not have bought their software. You'd be writing PostScript code in VI...or text in EDLIN...or something.
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.
Then write your data in text form. Or save as RTF. Or write in PostScript...or whatever. If you create something in AutoCad, you expect to be able to open it in AutoCad - anything else that opens is is just a nicety. If you don't like it, too bad.
You're happy to pay for proprietary software that will do the things you want it to do. If Office doesn't do that for you, then get something else. You're not being forced to use it. If you have to use it at work as part of your job, well, that's your company's issue - you get to deal.
apple is only a monopoly if you fiddle the stats like a salesman. apple is a member of the pc industry, of which it has (iirc) much less than 5% market share.
By your logic, sony are a monopoly because you cant buy a games console thats 100% compatible with the playstation 2.
Microsoft is a monopoly and (with good reason) monopolies have to play by different rules.
It's true that I can access my data in the short term, but in the future I may wish to change to a different office suite or hardware platform or OS for a very good reason.
Microsoft is free to change its upgrade policy and prices. It is free to stop supporting older operating systems.
All of which is as it should be. As a consumer, I have no right to demand that Microsoft suit me, beyond taking my business elsewhere.
However, I think it is a bit much to say that I have to choose between a critical security patch and being able to read all my documents.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
"A pub is private property that allows the public to enter. "
resaurants are public property, not private, unless specifically stated in a sign at the door "members only"
works out ok, wanna smoke? join a smokers club or something.
smoking is bad, get with it.
Check journal for info on Anti-TextBook, an idea by me.
troll? no.
mod's on crack? yes.
i was merely stating the facts which the parent (to this comments parent) could not grasp/did not know.
I made a choice to use MS Office as you say, because I wanted to be able to correspond with other people running MS Office.
I would have had other choices if I'd been able to rely on them to be able to produce legible documents when opened in MS Office.
As I live in the real world, a lot of people use Office, so I really had little choice, This wouldn't have been the case if Microsoft would just release what documentation they have on their formats. Not much to ask of the world's richest corporation, who I've already paid copious amounts of money to, surely?
As mentioned above it's easy to export from one SQL database to another, so it's a bad example.
You seem to think I want microsoft to write a converter for me. I don't. I just want some microserf to release the documentation about the format.
Maybe the clerk would have to run it by legal first.
It's not going to cost a fortune, they just have to put the file up on their website somewhere, and then people will be able to read their file formats and export to them
No other word processor is going to use their format natively, why would they use Microsoft's closed, obfuscated file format when they could use a standard format like the one proposed by the OASIS consortium?
I get the feeling you haven't Read The Fine Article -- having closed formats is a big issue for governments that don't want to -- in Paul Kangro's words -- "ask a third party for permission to open them [the documents]".
Why have closed formats when open formats would give you better business?
He wants to save formatting, so copy/paste is out? Not so, the clipboard is quite capable of storing more than plain text.
He wants to save formatting so remaking the file is out? Well if your new chosen software can't make it from scratch, a file conversion won't help, either!
If the user doesn't have word but was sent it? How is this any different to me recieving any file I can't open, eg an AutoCAD or Photoshop file if I don't have either?
The file was created before they switched to Linux? Plan ahead, next time, or install OO.o which does an OK job with word docs.
Considering that most OSS advocates are under the bizarre assumption that everyone can code, the macro/API solution is perfectly valid. You only need one person to do it and release it, anyway. You're saying there's not a single person out there both capable and willing to do this?
And as for MS actively stopping people from doing any of the above? Re-read the message title - bullsh*t! The Word/Excel APIs wouldn't be well documented and accessible with a pre-provided scripting language if MS were serious about hiding this stuff. Plus as has been stated, the details are available if you want to agree to their terms. If you don't, then it's your damn fault, not theirs.
The way out of this is to Open-source the data format, and let the software developers (MS, Corel, Sun, Abi, you and me) write software that produces and respects this data format. This may be closed (MSO) or open (OO.o) I don't care.
It works with the W3C HTML/XHTML/XML formats, and the multitude of editors/browsers. It can also work for office formats. All you need to do is download a OpenDocument-compliant editor, and work with it, complain about it, or even improve it. Make it industry-hardened like the Firefox bug hunt. Let the best, or most stable, or most feature-rich editor, or lowest price version become your personal editor.
MS may even (have to) join, to keep selling MSO to European/Brazilian governmental agencies and schools. If they then play their 'extend and deviate' strategy that worked so well for FrontPage/IE5 you can vote with your boot. That is, if you have not already voted with your wallet: OO.o is about E 500 cheaper than MSO, and if they share the same data format and feature-set, well, why bother with MSO?
Tonight I'll be installing OO.o 2.0 beta which is on the SuSE 9.3 DVD.
Microsoft is free to change its upgrade policy and prices. It is free to stop supporting older operating systems.
They certainly are, I'm not sure what relevance this has to what I was talking about, but I wholeheartedly agree.
If anything, there is too much backward compatibility in some Microsoft products to the point that the security and performance are affected, but that's a different story.
All of which is as it should be. As a consumer, I have no right to demand that Microsoft suit me, beyond taking my business elsewhere.
I am contending that Microsoft should release the documentation describing how they save my data, I realise that I have little hope of impacting them by myself, but I started out by debating with someone who claimed that people who want Microsoft to make their internal documentation about their file formats public. I felt compelled to put forth my point of view.
However, I think it is a bit much to say that I have to choose between a critical security patch and being able to read all my documents.
I'd agree, and it wouldn't be an issue if Microsoft would simply release the documentation about their file formats.
It's not a free market when I'm compelled to use Word because the people I communicate with are using Word, and competing products can't correctly operate with Word because the file formats are closed.
I'm not going to complain about monopolies, it wouldn't matter if nobody else in the world except the people I need to communicate with used Word, the reality is that I need to be able to rely on my documents being able to be opened and read by a reciever using MS Word, and ONLY MS Word is capable of that.
The thing I find incomprehensible is that Microsoft have so little confidence in their product that they feel they have to behave in this way. Microsoft would probably have me as an Office customer even if they didn't play silly games like this. As it is, it undermines my confidence in their products.
Nobody else has any issues documenting the file formats they use? Nobody? You're telling me that MS Office uses the only proprietary formats in existence?
Let's see some links to the 3ds max and Maya file formats. Since nobody else has issues documenting their file formats, I'm sure you'll have no trouble providing these.
Just a little thing called the EULA you probably did not even break stride when agreeing to.
I don't recall reading in their license the part where they told me their formats were secret and that their product would not interoperate properly with other software or future versions of Office.
If you could kindly point out that clause I'd be very grateful.
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?
He said it was akin to having a 'peeing section' in a pool. That's all he said.
A lot of people read something into 'public', but a public pool, like a public restaurant, is simply one that is open to the public.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
But in case you are, they provide a "Save As" feature where you can save it in an open format if you want.
Which open format? RTF? Word only suppports a pathetic subset of the RTF specification, which is itself a very weak format. All tables and even font specifications are stripped out of files saved in RTF format by word.
Word does not correctly interoperate with any other word processing software. It's a fact, and I challenge you to find me another word processor than can fully interoperate with Word. It's simply not possible because Microsoft won't release the specifications for their file format.
The problem is that 99% of people don't care what OS they're using becuase they haven't used a better one. It's the same reason one wouldn't care about what Internet browser they're using. If you only use IE, you think IE is decent.
Now, I've heard elsewhere that Linux can be fairly user-friendly, so that's not the problem AFAIK. The point is people know "Windows" and it gets bundled with their computers, so they take it.
Then if Joe Sixpack tries Linux and likes it more, and it spreads, then more apps and games will support it, which will get even more people to use it etc, etc. Of course, that hasn't happened.
"When the atomic bomb goes off there's devastation...but when the atomic bong goes off there's celebraaaaation!"
So, if 3 is too hard for you, just pay someone else to do it. Adobe Acrobat will do exactly what's being described here.
Open enough = "we have business hours and our front door is open between 8h30 and 4h00 " closed on weekends
How is this hurting you? If you were that concerned about it, you'd not have bought their software. You'd be writing PostScript code in VI...or text in EDLIN...or something.
How the fuck am I supposed to expect anyone to be able to open and edit postscript documents?
I communicate with people in the real world, those people use Microsoft Word, not fucking post script readers. Maybe when you grow up and have to communicate with other people you'll understand.
Then write your data in text form. Or save as RTF. Or write in PostScript...or whatever. If you create something in AutoCad, you expect to be able to open it in AutoCad - anything else that opens is is just a nicety. If you don't like it, too bad.
The thing is, you see that autocad have published their file format because they realise that it's better for their customers that way.
You're happy to pay for proprietary software that will do the things you want it to do. If Office doesn't do that for you, then get something else. You're not being forced to use it. If you have to use it at work as part of your job, well, that's your company's issue - you get to deal.
That's right, and MS Office does all that I need it to and more, the only thing I have an issue with is that my data is locked up in a proprietary format that it's not possible to export verbatim, which wouldn't be a problem if MS made like autodesk and released the specifications to their file format.
No, it's like asking Ford to publish complete specifications to their engines, which they already do.
Bullshit. A pub is private property that allows the public to enter.
Microsoft = pub
If a pub owner would like to allow smoking, the customers have the choice to enter or not.
Smoking = access to document standards.
If a pub owner would like to allow smoking, the customers have the choice to enter or not.
I get it now... so all this fight for open standards is actually a cleverly disguised campaign to remove smoking bans! It all makes sense now!!!
unable to resolve function slashdot.sig(), aborting...
If the user doesn't have word but was sent it? How is this any different to me recieving any file I can't open, eg an AutoCAD or Photoshop file if I don't have either?
The difference is that both the Autocad and Photoshop formats are well documented, which makes it easy to create programs that can interoperate with both of these programs.
The file was created before they switched to Linux? Plan ahead, next time, or install OO.o which does an OK job with word docs.
OO does an OK job of importing word files, it does a crap job of exporting word files, insofar as some files from OO can cause crashes in Word, granted sometimes it seems like sneezing can cause that, making your customer's computer crash every time they try to open a document is not a way to endear them to you.
Considering that most OSS advocates are under the bizarre assumption that everyone can code, the macro/API solution is perfectly valid. You only need one person to do it and release it, anyway. You're saying there's not a single person out there both capable and willing to do this?
That's exactly what I'm saying. It's impossible -no doubt about it to create a perfectly compatible word processor, because Microsoft won't release the specifications to their file format.
Because of Microsoft's EULA it would be illegal for any other software to support an import filter based on information from reverse engineering Word, so the people making software are limited to trying to guess Word's obfuscated format.
Except then everyone I know has to buy adobe acrobat or they won't be able to edit the documents I send them.
You're also assuming that everyone has Adobe Reader installed, or has the permissions to install it.
As I said to the last person who said this, show me where in the EULA it said that my data would be stored in a secret file format that can't be opened in other software...
I think what we're all forgetting is that Openoffice.org was developed in a corporate model. I don't think the open source model could have developed such a beast as Openoffice.org. It's kind of ironic that to get rid of our corporate overlord Microsoft, we have to turn to the corporate development model, and not open source.
"Why should I have to sign an agreement?" one audience member demanded to know.
I would like to know what they guy answered.
Cheers,
RoadkillBunny
The only real difference is the terms of the agreement.
GPL does not apply to data formats or processing algorithms. At least it was not intended to.
You can look at the source and write your own (or better), and license it whatever you like. "Doing like the other guy" is not copyright infringement, and GPL is based on copyright.
NDA (and perhaps the MS agreement I didn't see anyway), on the other side, limits usage of *the knowledge you can get viewing the formats description*. No it's not the same.
WYSIWIG, but what you see might not be what you need
(just to be on topic)
Microsoft Word!
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.
It's not a free market when I'm compelled to use Word because the people I communicate with are using Word, and competing products can't correctly operate with Word because the file formats are closed.
Yes, actually, it is - in the capitalist sense.
In a capitalist society, interoperability is not a concern. Microsoft was born from true capitalism, and there's no reason for them to change.
It's like asking Mazda to fit the engine from the RX-8 into your home-(re)built VW Beetle.
I agree. You can save it as HTML. *queue laugh track* :)
In all seriousness, I don't understand why people - Americans, even - are griping about this situation. Their country was founded on these principles. Yes, it's somewhat unfair that their principles are being forced on other countries that are more liberal/socialist in this sense. But that's the global economy for you.
Just wait a few years and see what fun happens with the Chinese software industry - or, for that matter, all of their industries. I mean, in a communist/socialist country, it is not beyond the power of the government to legislate a software product into existence - and to mandate its usage throughout the government.
Hey man. You make a point here. But is it really a valid one? The fact is that if the company providing the software ever dies, you'll be left with nothing. All of your data lost forever (we can imagine that scenario). This poses a serious question concerning document formats. The question, ultimately, is very simple: should we ever use software that manipulates closed document formats? Seems like a real threat to me.
Almost all of our data is becoming purely digital nowadays and this is not ever going to change back. Open data formats are essential if we care about our data. Period.
Why even spend time reading the agreement if there is an alternative that doesn't require spending that time, or consulting legal?
Proprietary's only advantage would be if it offset all of this by being MUCH less expensive.
There is not nearly enough love in the world, but there is far too much trust.
As someone who had managed a restaurant for 10 years, I can safely say you do not know what the hell you are taking about. Because a business is classified as in the "service sector" does not have it public property. You can be arrested for trespassing in a restaurant if you are asked to leave and refuse.
Anonymous Cowards suck.
This is why I always advise people (strangers) looking at/for MS office about OpenOffice.org anywhere I see them (library, store, where ever). "I actually own my data - how about you?" Often they are interested in a program for more secure, compact (document files) & PDFs for the "cost" of a 65mb download (our local cable sells 5gb & 10gb/mo plans).
"So your idea of free and fair competition is that every product should float no matter if another product completely outperforms/outmarkets them? I still don't see how were they illegaly forced out of the markets."
They neither "outperformed" or "outmarketed" them. MS used their OS monopoly with manufacturers to leverage their Office suite when WordPerfect was the standard. MS "bundled" Word et. al. and offered "reduced" rates to orginizations that "upgraded" from there seriously undercutting WP and Lotus. MS was convicted of this type behavior but the watered down settlement (if you want to call it that) hasn't done a thing to correct it. They are now using their monopoly in the Office market to try to keep out Open Source with a cheesy license that is targeted directly at FOSS.
B.
This is a sig. This is only a sig. Had this been an actual sig you would have been informed where to tune for more sigs.
Some people get so upset when their article posts are rejected... Glad I use Firefox!
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?
In the end of the day, Microsoft has no obligation to make it easy for you to switch to another office suite. They have no obligation to support any other product. It is up to the other product to make the transition as easy as possible since they are the ones trying to win your business. "Open" documents would certainly be nice and many people (governments) simply choose products with open formats to begin with, but that doesn't mean Microsoft has any legal obligation to open their formats and it's a bit silly for anyone to "demand" it of them.
Moof.
there's one important thing your forgeting. You're house is for your use. Nobody else is normally effected by what you do. On the other hand a resturant is open to the public. If you're negligence in a resturant causes injury to a patron you can be held accountable. (e.g. if there's a spill on the floor that causes someone to fall and be injured, you are liable.) the same could apply to allowing smoking if it injures a patron through no fault of their own you could be held responsible.
<gir voice> I love this sig... </gir voice>
No, restaurants are private property. They can deny you entry. Dress codes are an example.
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!
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
Thats hogwash. If you've got the software to create, read and export your documents now what difference does it make whether the company who originally made that software goes bust or not?
" "Why should I have to sign an agreement?" one audience member demanded to know. "
So that when you pirate it and put it up on the web, they can nail yer wanker butt to the wall.
ianal but actully the person who owns the bar would be sued. atleast thats what one of my lawyer friends said
http://www.cushingproductions.com
1. You use their software voluntarily for storing *your* data.
Except that MS is a monopoly in the field and illegally abused that monopoly to make it very hard for anyone to use anything else via several illegal acts including illegal OEM bundling contracts and illegally withholding Win95 32-bit APIs.
2. Your data is - and remains - perfectly accessible via the software they provide, that you voluntarily purchased to use
Except it is impossible to buy a new copy of that software and in some cases illegal to transfer that software to a new computer when your current one dies. Also much of the information we are talking about here belongs to "THE PEOPLE OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA" whose politicians unwisely and after being given large donations decided to put documents owned by the people into that format. I'd say it is decidedly in the public interest to either force those formats to be public so the information is preserved and available or convert all those documents now and pass laws prohibiting storing documents owned by the people in a format that is owned by a private entity. Other governments have and are in the process of doing that very thing.
Get real. That's true about pure text documents, but any complex document never gets fully exported by most software (especially MS software), so you lose a lot in the process. And since the format is a closed one, you'll never get the extra info - that which doesn't get exported at all, or at least partially or in a wrong way. But even if you didn't (which is very rare actually), you'd have to dedicate huge amounts of time exporting all of your data. I don't think you get it. A dozen personal letters don't count here. Then, there may be a time when your old software won't run on any current computer - now what? Go to the museum to get the job done? Find an emulator and pray it works? Last but not least, that's not even counting with the new trend: software activation. What if the company goes out of business and you're left with some software that you can't activate? (Or the license of which actually doesn't allow you to run the software if the company doesn't exist anymore, yes it can happen my friend, since it's actually in the essence of a lot of closed-source software licenses...)
So hogwash? Yeah right. The long-term usability of documents *is* clearly threatened by closed formats; not to mention that open, standard formats are most often much better designed, with clear intentions and general purpose in mind - another guarantee that it's a solid framework for your data. Just my 2 cents.
1. I legally buy ALL of my Microsoft products. I don't mind spending $150-200 on Windows, seeing as since it's the bloody OS, it's the single most important peice of software on the whole box, and I'll have it for 2-3 years at least, so it's a worthwhile investment.
2. If I get Microsoft software from work, and it's installed on one of my home machines, that falls under the corporate EULA and my company's policy, because I use it for work-related tasks when at home.
3. Most people who complain about Windows dysfunctions are morons who haven't even read the manuals, tons of help documentation, or EULA. They're also mostly people who just flip out straight off the bat instead of trying to figure out what the problem was in the first place.
4. If you're an idiot, that's not Microsoft's fault.
5. You can keep yer damn English ale! Give me a Bock, a Pils, or a Harp!
Spend enough time adminning Microsoft boxes and you'll get pretty pissed when someone tries to take away your right to step out to the sidewalk to have a smoke. or two.
Cheers.
This is my sig. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
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.
/.) companies need to listen very carefully to their customers, especially those who are actually speaking up. Most customers don't tell you they are unhappy, they simply stop using your product and never say a word. Sure you run into the occasional jack-ass who thinks you are his personal butler. But it's still worth listening to such people because sometimes they tell you something worthwhile. Apple has done a remarkably good job of this lately with online music whereas the RIAA companies have done a really poor job.
How do you know? I don't ask to be trite. I've worked tech support and having been in your position myself I do really sympathize with having to deal with that annoying 5%. But there is a huge difference between offering a free service (like you do - and bravo for it) and a for-profit company like Microsoft. A free service doesn't have to care about that 5%. Use it or don't. It doesn't matter. But if you genuinely are interested in providing a service your users find valuable (and Microsoft is), how do you know what they want?
This isn't an idle or easy question. The entire field of marketing is the art/science of finding out what it is people want. (As opposed to sales which is figuring out how to convince them you have what they want - and yes, they overlap) While there are a lot of people who have a severely outsized sense of entitlement (more that a few are here at
I've worked as a Malcolm Baldrige examiner and one of the things we ask companies is how they know what their customers want. WAY too many firms basically take the approach of "well, no one has complained so we must be doing something right". That approach is usually a swift route to poor performance if not bankruptcy. The firms that do well go WAY out of their way to figure out what customers want, even before the customers are conciously aware of it.
Of course in the case of Microsoft the motives are a bit more sinister. They're almost certainly more interested in customer lock via proprietary formats than anything else. We know it and MS knows we know it. So people are giving them a hard time about it. After all, it really isn't in my best interest as an end user to use a proprietary Microsoft format if there are any alternatives. So it shouldn't be at all surprising that people are complaining. It's in their (and likely your) interest to do so.
OK, that makes more sense as an analogy.
Why, oh why, didn't I take the Blue Pill?
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 the proprietary {software;standard} can do something that the open version can't, then there's an argument for using it. I'm a firm believer in the "rising water level" model of open source, whereby proprietary companies are perfectly able to survive *as long as they keep climbing*.
For the love of God, please learn to spell "ridiculous"!!!
Proprietary file formats are bad for long-term storage of your data. Can you get to your data 30, 40 years from now? Is the company still in business. Can the hardware of the future run the old stuff that read your data?
Are you locking up your IP in someone else's IP? You may find that you have to spend a lot of effort or money to get at your data in the future (if at all).
Open standards reduce that risk by a long shot because you can convert the data to new systems.
So that when you pirate it and put it up on the web, they can nail yer wanker butt to the wall.
For a DOCUMENT FORMAT?
If all of Microsoft's "free" readers end in a .exe, then I say, no, they are not free. That is, I would have to buy a MS license for the operating system to run that "free" reader. And is the cost of that "free" reader rolled into the cost of that license?
I donno... just asking.
I'm first in line to defend the merits of capitalism, but the scope of monopoly rights granted by copyright has nothing to do with capitalism.
Governments are making it Microsoft's problem.
THEY ARE THE CUSTOMER.
In older times, it was customary that the customer was given what the customer asked for. This is at least what's supposed to happen in a non-monopolized marketplace.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
No, his idea of free and fair competition implies that MORE THAN ONE option can continue to exist and thrive in the marketplace. If that isn't happening then the market is broken and needs to be fixed.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
It's not a free market in the capitalist sense.
Replacability of product is being interfered with by some external factor. Some artificial constraint is acting to alter your future buying decisions.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
"These principles" were deemed unacceptable over 100 years ago and dealt with as a matter of law. Some elements of economic anarchy are simply unacceptable. This is the hardly the only example.
The FTC and SEC are other clear examples.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
In the first place, calling people who want Microsoft to open their formats extremists is stupid, because Microsoft is a monopoly. In fact, most of the reasoning behind this has nothing whatsoever to do with OSS idealogy, but leveling the playing field in the office suite marketplace.
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?"
Except this idea does not work and has been proven to be nothing more than a fantasy. Just look at Ralph Nader; he said that even if Bush got elected, it would be okay because the country would swing away from the right. Now things are probably much worse (from Nader's POV at least) than he ever imagined, and his Green Party revolution is dead and burried.
I work in an advertising agency. I used to be a creative, but moved to the IT department because I couldn't stand the stupidity of those 'professionals'. You wouldn't believe what bullshit seemingly completely intelligent and nice people will send to you. "Word images" are routine (you say "please send me that image you have used in your image brochure" and they send you a .doc with the embedded image. Anyone who knows a better way than printing the .doc to Distiller with Print settings and opening that in Photoshop, please come up with it.)
;)
Hell, I've been sent a completely designed and layouted 32 page manual for a complex online media application including images and videos, in EXCEL. I guess to a businesswoman with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
(That file is still being passed around as a curiosity between people in the field.)
I won't get into clients sending images in 72dpi and 70x140 pixels to be used as a background on an 18/1 (the standard billboard format here in Germany). I like it best that they *all* act like it's your fault that it simply is not usable for being printed at that size. Actually, that helps me to practice my kindness, like some strange Buddhist excercise. Not being drawn down by stupidity is a valuable gift that needs lots of training.
"Sir, there is a hidden message in that text you've read to me for the third time now."
Call it a Zen Fight Club.
Who is General Failure and why is he reading my hard disk?
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
"Why should I have to sign an agreement?"
/. rating. I can almost see the guy reading this with his moderator points thinking, "Hey, I'm the sort of people he's talking about! -1 for him." On the other hand, I'm also too damn tired to care. So you can see my little dillema on posting this :)
I see they're really asking the tough questions. I find it funny that somebody would ask such a simple-minded question. I find it yet funnier that the article commented on it. Still, it gets worse when the slashdotter's summary includes it again. I think it's very widely known that Microsoft does weird decisons like make people sign agreements. Why is it that people feel the need to point this out anymore? Can't it just be left unsaid that it doesn't make any sense? Why must people be so explicit? It's like when people ask questions in class (I'm a college student) that they know the answer to, and only so people will know what a deep thinker they are. Let's all take a moment to pat ourselves on the back. There, there. Patting yourself on the back gets you nowhere. It's like we're trying to convince ourselves, when it's everybody else that must be convinced. This one-sided-ness gets discriminated against in the news world (think Fox News), but here, everybody loves it.
One one hand, I don't care that much anymore and don't give a damn about my
I was under the impression that the PDF standard is NOT freely published, making it so those who wish to support it in third party applications had to jump through hoops to do so.
It's like asking Mazda to fit the engine from the RX-8 into your home-(re)built VW Beetle.
No it's not, it's like asking Mazda and VolksWagon to publish specifications for their cars so that someone can figure out if an RX 8 engine can be fitted. Car manufacturers do publish specifications of their engines and chassis.
I'm not saying that Microsoft should do anything except publish the format that they store my data in like most other professional companies.
Or claiming that a program is a derivative work because it links to a GPL'd library. All are examples that could only be considered even vaguely entertainable by the extremely anal.
If I run a GPL'd application on my computer it is likely that everything else running will be powered by derivative electrons. After all the compile and runtime counts right?
but that doesn't mean Microsoft has any legal obligation to open their formats and it's a bit silly for anyone to "demand" it of them.
I'm not demanding anything of them, but I don't think it's valid to say that I shouldn't complain about the fact that they go out of their way to thwart interoperability, and I shouldn't ask for better treatment from a company of which I'm a customer.
I'm trying to spark a bit of debate about openness, because it interests me to find out what viewpoints people on the other side of the fence have. So far all people have been able to say is "it's a free market d000d!" or "shut up and stop whining", no one has been able to provide a good reason why Microsoft should be able to keep the format they store my data in a secret.
If the "free market" was allowed to exist completely unchecked, Multinationals would have all it's employees working for a cup of rice a week and chained to their desks if they thought it increased their profits,
I'd be happy if Microsoft would release their documentation about their file formats, I don't want them to write new export filters, or save in a different format. As it is, no one can make a reliable import filter for Word documents for any other office suite, and I find that annoying.
Feel free to use Notepad. Or, you can get the free Word, Excel, or PowerPoint reader.
Uh huh. Let me guess, you live at home and are still at school right?
I have to be able to create, and modify Word documents and have a reasonably high chance that the recipient will be able to open any documents I create in Microsoft Office, complete with formatting, pagination, etc. I can't send people documents that accidentally overflow a buffer in MS Word because the author of the export filter didn't understand the format properly because he was making educated guesses at how Word stores data.
My office suite needs to be made by someone with access to Microsoft's documentation, currently that means Office for Windows or Office for Mac. I'd like my choice of computing platform not to be limited by my choice of office suite.
What gives them the right to treat my work in that way after I have already paid them?
I didnt realized your paying money for something entitled you to so many rights. I demand to have full access to the source code and structure of the save game files for Doom 3!!!
What the fuck are you talking about?
I'm not asking for access to their source code, I'm asking for them to document the structure for data that is saved by their product. You're making stuff up.
Is there a MS rep over there, FORCING you to save in their file format? Last I checked, you could save in a ton of alternate file formats, including HTML. And last I checked, HTML didnt require MS Office to view.
Have you ever tried saving a document in Microsoft's HTML format and then looking at it in any browser except IE? Not to mention the fact that the HTML, like all Word export filters strips out a lot of formatting even when viewed in IE.
Stop being a typical whiney Slashdot bitch.
Stop being a typical AC Slashdot troll.
I didn't mean to suggest that you yourself are being demanding, but the general feeling of posts suggest that most people feel Microsoft owes them open formats.
There are plenty of instances in which you can point your finger at Microsoft and show that they abuse their position in the free market, but in this instance they don't owe their competitors the specs and they don't owe you the specs. It is your data, but it is still their specification. If you are concerned about accessing your data, then that is one more reason to choose an open solution to begin with.
That's why I personally don't use Microsoft products. I very much prefer open formats and standards-compliant software. I still don't think the world owes me those things.
Moof.
but reverse engineering Close Source code is NOT fine.
No, reverse engineering to allow interorroperability is extremely important. Unfortunately, the lawmakers don't yet realise how important.
Making reverse engineering illegal is fundamentally incompatible with a free market.
Do you really want to live in a world where your leased version of M$Windows will only work with your M$ licensed PC, which will only talk to your M$ licensed mobile phone, which will only talk to your M$ licensed display, which can only send video to your M$ licensed TV, M$ licensed stereo, M$ licensed clock radio, M$ refigerator (internet ordering), M$ internet enabled car (GPS etc.), M$ internet enabled house, M$ licensed web sites and M$ licensed voting machine? Oh, and by-the-way, all communications are encrypted so no chance of sniffing them even without reverse engineering the code.
That's the world we're headed for if reverse engineering and thus interroperability is made illegal.
Making reverse engineering illegal allows an established monopoly/oligopoly player to leverage into other areas, and eventually, all areas. Prefer a Sony device? Tough, it doesn't talk to your M$ devices and so is useless. Want to read your own documents? Sure, but make sure your M$ Windows lease is up-to-date. Oh, and by the way there is a mandatory "upgrade" coming that will cost you $x and we don't like potential competitor y so we're silently blocking your access to their products and causing furfies. All hidden and encrypted of course.
Want to create a product to compete with an existing M$ product? Sure, but your market entry costs will be insane because you'll have to duplicate the entire M$ interconnection before you can compete with comparable value, let alone better value. And you'll have to deal with a monopoly player with sufficient cash reserves to run at a loss for years. Alternatively, you can pay for the M$ licenses but because they are a monopoly that will cost you about 0.1% less than your gross profit, meaning your net profit will be zero.
You need to think long and hard about what you like about the free market. Interroperability matters. In niche segments no big deal but when a substantial proportion of a big market gets locked in it has democracy compromising effects.
In addition the economic network effect is important and has profound implications for any "IP" market. When one player can write a piece of software (e.g. M$) and get a thousand times the profit compared to another player who writes identically functional software for the same cost (e.g. Sun), and can use that excess profit to "compete" and can also block interroperability, then the free market is dead.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
Nothing prevents those customers from switching.
Nonsense. Read up on economic network effect/externalities. If you have an office with 9 PC's and 1 Mac, guess what usually happens to the Mac, even if the Mac is technically superior? A form of market failure.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
I don't think that the world owes me everything. I do think that Microsoft owes me some competition. There's no question that they have the resources to compete, should they ever be forced to, but instead, they stomp competition into the ground. Ultimately, this translates into stomping the users into the ground.
The real question is, why do I want to be trampled, when there's perfectly good alternatives out there? I'm going to go use them, and if the world goes Word-only, I'll go back to fucking paper. At least my paperclip won't talk to me.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Did you ever write a single line of code yourself?
Do you know what XML is, besides what it stands for?
Are you an anonymous coward because you are astroturf?
Get this through your head: Open formats are easy. They take about five minutes, using XML. You want to charge for that? Ok, you get $.02, because that's how much it would cost me to write that format by myself.
It takes even less time to publish such a format on the Internet, especially if you already have to have a DTD for it. Just upload the DTD somewhere and be done with it. Just this small guesture of good will -- less effort than farting -- would have saved people days and weeks trying to reverse-engineer a broken format.
Or are you implying that somehow by opening the format, they are giving away their word processor? Such a stupid statement rarely comes anywhere but from the horse's mouth. Hello, Mr. Ballmer!
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
"However, it was the proprietary standards that grew up and allowed those open standards to develop."
Yeah, that's because people were so ticked off at the proprietary standards that they created open alternatives.
If you're reading this, stop it.
1. Then you are an exception rather than the rule. I know of no-one in my circle of friends & work colleagues who has ever bought a boxed MS operating system or product. Sure, a few of them have bought complete PCs with Windows on, but most build their own and just use copies of MS CDs.
2. I know (or care) nothing about MS EULAs but I wasn't aware that they covered home use. Sure, if you have a company laptop that you take home, that's okay but if it's your own PC then it does not fall under what your company purchased as bulk licenses from MS.
3. Agreed, but then the morons have fallen for the marketing hype about PCs being easy to use and maintain. MS and PC vendors are to blame for this so if they have complaining morons as customers, they can blame their marketing people.
4. As in point 3, it is if MS have played you for an idiot and got you to part with your money in the first place.
5. If I keep my English ale then that's fine because it means there's more of it for me! :-)
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
While all your points are valid in their own respect - it still does not answer the fundamental notion that who are we to crack someone elses code? What gives us the right to go into an MS product and trying to figure out the code? Unfortunately, if you want your product to be 100% (with a grain of salt) compatable with MS you gotta pay them a license fee to get some insight - but that is their choice. Your choice as a consumer is to not buy MS. Use Open Office where it is Open Source. We do not have a fundamental right to crack the code of someone elses product without their explicit permission no matter what we would like to justify.
As I have always said, if the system is broken - then fix it within the system - not by circumventing it which (as in our case) is illegal and can get you in a load of legal battles that you won't win.
I mod down so you can mod up. Your welcome.
How many times do we have to point out that reverse engineering is NOT the same as "cracking code". You obviously haven't a clue about computer programming and the issues at hand.
As for my citation - as I said before, read my sig it is a lawyer who apparantly works in the field with regards to EULAs.Apparently? You're quoting this guy and you don't even know for sure? Had you done any research at all, you would have found he was talking about a specific case - Blizzard's EULA prohibits third party selling of in game items and characters. While EULA's may, in some cases, constitute a legal contract, a contract is only valid where it doesn't contradict existing laws. In Don's own words "So, if you call a lawyer right now and say, are EULAs enforceable, he will likely get into the above and his final answer would be "it depends, but in some cases the only way to tell is to go to court." Since the law specifically states that reverse engineering IS legal, any portion of a EULA that denies you that right is unenforcable.
Unfortunately, if you want your product to be 100% (with a grain of salt) compatable with MS you gotta pay them a license fee to get some insight - but that is their choice. Your choice as a consumer is to not buy MS. Use Open Office where it is Open Source.
Um, you do realize that Open Office had to reverse engineer the Microsoft Office formats? You are contradicting yourself here.
Open Source for Open Minds
The drm however isn't, or at least wasn't, published, it was necessary to reverse-engineer that, but normal pdfs are fine.
I am trolling
How is that easily available to anyone who is not using Windows?
That self-extracting zip file is of no use to anyone on a Mac, or a sparc based computer, no matter what they do. Do I not deserve to see this open standard because I don't want to spend $300 for a lousy OS?
If MS had wanted this standard to be open they would have offered it in formats that weren't Windows specific.
Open Source for Open Minds
DOS ain't done 'till Lotus won't Run used to be an internal motto at MS. They even had posters on the walls. It was discovered that MS had deliberately introduced bugs into MSDOS 2 that prevented Lotus from running correctly. This was illegal, and not the only time MS broke the law to establish their monopoly. Windows 3.2 would check which version of DOS you had, and refuse to run under any other than MSDOS. Microsoft claimed other versions of DOS, like DRDOS (a superior product) weren't capable of running windows, when actually they were. By the time anyone was able to prove that MS had deliberately prevented other DOS's from running windows (love that hidden source) it was too late for most of the other DOS's to compete.
Why do you think MS lost the anti-trust case? Do you think they would have lost if they hadn't broken the laws and illegally forced other companies out of buisiness? Which part of the word Guilty didn't you understand?
TommyOpen Source for Open Minds
Had they not illegally squashed competion that would be true. However, MS should be penalized for illegally establishing a monoply by being forced to release the standards by which their software saves files. Courts in several countries agree.
Had MS competed fairly all along none of this would be an issue, and they wouldn't be forced to "give up" their standards.
Open Source for Open Minds
that's what i'm referring to. I meant if YOU are the owner of a bar/resturant. YOU could be held liable for injury to a patron
<gir voice> I love this sig... </gir voice>
I'm glad you agree that we need to freely exchange a standard document "architecture" that's readable by all.
If you understand that, then you should also see why it's obvious that either Microsoft should open their Office formats to public use or NO ONE should use them for public use...(Internal use is fine.)
There is certainly no reason that a world-wide standard document architecture should be owned by a single company. They very thought is ludicrous, but look at where we are today. 20 years from now THESE will be the bad days!
So if doesn't export what you want then this is a failure of the implementation, not of longevity (the point of the post). As a consequence you then shouldn't have bought it in the first place. Open source is a good thing because it offers a choice to the closed proprietry offerings, but it doesn't mean everything has to follow the open source model. But this is a different topic.
On activation - this is really your only valid point that counters my original. In most circumstances activation is only on install - assuming consumer software (not counting dongles and all that). But then if the software breaks then it doesn't meet my previously stated requirements.
Above all propietry formats exist for reason and have their place. All the doomsdayers have always predicted the end of the world because of closed source\formats and its yet to manifest itself.
who are we to crack someone elses code?
Companies do not have rights, citizens have rights. I hate the loaded word "rights". There are many conflicting rights here with shareholders, employees, customers, third parties, the patent/copyight offices, the courts and even the police all having rights and responsibilities in regard to commercial transactions.
In any case property rights have never been universal. e.g. An amazing variety of people can legally enter your house, house owners can't open businesses, the government can forceably buy a house for a highway, patents expire, copyrights expire (in theory anyway), gun owners have restrictions, farmers can't stop mineral prospectors in some jurisdictions etc.
The fact is the property owner's right to restrict code access conflicts directly with the consumers right to do what they like with a product they've purchased. One of the ways that copyright law is currently broken is the way vendors try to "lease" software, breaking first sale doctrine and engage in all sorts of anti-competitive behaviour (see my previous posr!). I expect the law will eventually catch up but until then a bit of thumbing-your-nose is entirely appropriate. New law frequently codifies existing practice and I for one do not want the practice of no-consumer-rights to be codified.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
Business entities do have rules and regulations that govern them. They have certain rights they can claim to. "Right" is a loose word to say the leat - it is any rule that grants you the ability to do certain actions. Also, lets not alianate corps all together...a corporation is run by people and people definitly have rights.
The problem with your last paragraph and the right of the consumer to do whatever they want with the product (not entirely true either, there are many products that consumers can buy which they are not allowed to do anything they want with....i.e. guns, dynamyte, air conditioners that use CFC's, etc.)...but in our case - the difference between me buying a car and modding it up, and me buying a program - is that I can easily and with nil cost reproduce that game and give it to people for free. I cannot reproduce that car and just give it away for free (or sell it) without heavy infrastructure. THere is your difference. And in all honesty - you and I both know that people copy programs and give it to people.
I mod down so you can mod up. Your welcome.