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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?
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.
You are able to do so, despite MS best efforts. People had to reverse engineer the doc format to get this accomplished.
So I don't really see your point. Just because people make great efforts to accomplish something that would be trivial if MS released the specs or adhered to an open standard, doesn't mean that MS is in the right, does it?
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.
our customers are also opened enough....we only have to give them a litle more vaseline to maximize the opening
Actually, OpenOffice's encoding for .doc doesn't work perfectly. And it's a downright bitch if you're trying to pass files between OpenOffice and Word. I was a freelance manual writer for a while, and my copy of Word self-destructed. (It wouldn't take the activation code that was printed ON THE DISK.)
.doc encoder based on intelligent guesswork. If the standards were open, they could get compatability spot on.
So I thought, time to switch to an open alternative. Bad idea. I couldn't pass edits to the engineer I was working with because every time I'd get back a file with corrupted layout and images about the size of Jupiter.
As far as I can tell, this is because they have to build their
A strain of paranoid prevention can be worse than the disease, whate'er the intention.
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.
No.
From the GPL:If by "use" you mean "redistribute" then things are more complex, but since at the moment you are trying to compare the GPL to a contract which must be signed in order merely to read a certain document, there does not seem to be any reason to focus on redistribution unless you are trying to change the subject and/or create an aimless flamewar.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
And they say the GPL is viral!
They probably won't look the same, except in the most trivial cases. However you don't have that level of confidence if you use one version of Microsoft Office and send the document to a user with a different version of Microsoft Office, so you don't have much to lose by using OO.o instead.
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.
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?
If MS Word could import and export .SXW files natively, there would be no need for MS Word in the first place. It's only the fact that Word -- and nothing else -- can read .DOC files properly, that keeps Microsoft selling it. If Word could import and export .SXW files, an organisation could keep just one PC with a copy of Windows and Office {plus OO.o export}, all the rest using OpenOffice.org, and use just this one machine for translating legacy documents.
.SXW files .....
Now, MS Word has a macro language -- a bastardised dialect of BASIC -- and a document object model {though not quite like the W3C ECMAscript one} that allows the canny programmer access to every feature of a document. And the code to synthesise and analyse SXW files is open source. It ought to be very possible for some third party to write a Microsoft Word plugin to do absolutely seamless import and export of OO.o
If I had a copy of Windows and a copy of Office, I'd be having a go myself. As it is, I got clean three years ago and don't intend to relapse anytime soon. Someone else can have the glory.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
OOo Writer has an "Export to PDF" menu point in the "File" menu. It is ideal for preservation of the format -- unless the receiving party needs to edit it, that is. But in vast majority of cases, just sending over something for people to read, PDF is sufficient.
Sig erased via substitution of an identical one.
"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.