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We're Open enough, Says Microsoft
An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft Australia has come under fire from rival vendors and open-source advocates for keeping its Office document standards proprietary.
Greg Stone, Microsoft's national technology officer for Australia and New Zealand, faced criticism during his presentation at the Australian Unix User Group conference in Canberra yesterday. However, he stood firm on the company's policy of making the XML schemas for its Office 2003 document standard publicly available provided interested parties sign an agreement with the software heavyweight. "Why should I have to sign an agreement?" one audience member demanded to know."
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.
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.
Because you want something that they have. They developed the file formats, so they own the intellectual property. If you want them to spell out how they work for you, you'll have to play by their rules. If you don't like that, that's fine too. You don't have to know now their file formats work to use their product, and when it comes down to it you don't even have to use their product.
This seems to me a lot like the BitKeeper debacle. It's all about contracts: the people who have something of value get to dictate the terms of the contract. No matter how much you complain about it and say "but file formats should be free!", that's not going to change.
However, he stood firm on the company's policy of making the XML schemas for its Office 2003 document standard publicly available provided interested parties sign an agreement with the software heavyweight. "Why should I have to sign an agreement?" one audience member demanded to know.
Isn't this basically the same as me agreeing to the terms of the GPL when I download GPLed source for a library or app that manipulates some open source document format? The only real difference is the terms of the agreement.
using namespace slashdot;
troll::post();
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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
Root is safe, beta is gold, MS is open enough and MN2004 is coming back on a corrected trajectory. All makes sense.
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.
and I also believe all politicians are honest and truthful
Justin.
You're only jealous cos the little penguins are talking to me.
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
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?
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
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?
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.
"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.
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.
It's a fallacy to assume that Word can open .DOC files perfectly. It doesn't. Do you have any idea how many .DOC formats have been created over the years? There are rules governing what versions will open which version .DOC and when you're given a random floppy to open with a random version of Word - cross your fingers. Then there's the international incompatibilities... And don't get me started on Works!
.DOC isn't 'all that'. OASIS is a MUCH more open and stable format, and will be for years to come.
I wish a mainstream reporter would investigate this so that businesses can understand that
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
"I still don't see how were they illegaly forced out of the markets."
;). This was also illegal.
The marketplace success of MS Office had little to do with the performance of the product. It had everything to do with:
1. Withholding the Win32 programming interface from competitors as long as possible prior to the launch of Windows 95 (i.e until Office95 was nearly completed) so that they could advertise that only Office had 32-bit apps. This is a classic example of using a monopoly in one field (Windows) to obtain a monopoly in another field (office productivity software). This is unequivocally illegal under U.S. antitrust law.
2. Bundling agreements to get as many PCs as possible pre-loaded with Office, particularly for business use. These agreements contained strong financial incentives (in the form of discounts on Windows licensing) for offering consumers only Microsoft products and not any competing software (believe me, I know, sayeth the AC
3. Obfuscated and changing file formats that ensured that competing products would not be able to read the latest versions of Office files. Once MS killed off all of the competition, this tactic lost momentum, because MS was largely competing against older versions of their own software, and people became worried that upgrading to newer versions would make their older PCs (running Office 97, for example) unable to interchange files with newer computers. This tactic is not inherently illegal, as far as I know, but it could have been legitimately prohibited as part of a remedy after Microsoft's antitrust conviction, and (to get back on topic) is clearly something that could legitimately be prohibited in government specifications for acceptable software.
So, yes, my idea of "free and fair competition" allows one company to attempt to "outperform/outmarket" another, but only if they obey the law. Microsoft did not obey the law.
OpenDocument is being supported and encouraged within the EU. It will also be supported in OpenOffice 2.0, which is due out soon. The beta for OOo 2 is out already for testing.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
He didn't say it was the way to go. In fact, quite teh opposite, he advocated alternative open source software. What he said was that he didn't advocate reverse engineering closed source software. He went on to say that a company has a reason for closing the software down and it's no right to crack it just because we can. But he certainly never said he was in support of closed source software.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
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!!!
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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.
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?
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