Slashdot Mirror
No Office For Linux, MS Patents Rejected
Bays Fil wrote to mention a ZDNet piece discussing the U.S. Patent Office's rejection of two Microsoft patents on the FAT file system. "There has been concern that if the FAT patents are upheld, Microsoft may claim that Linux infringes on Microsoft technology and will seek a royalty. Any monetary compensation could threaten the operating system, which under General Public License (GPL) terms may not be distributed if it contains patented technology that requires royalty payments." Relatedly, Dayrl writes "Microsoft reiterates its firm decision not to offer its Office Suite on Linux anytime soon. From the article: 'Microsoft is 100 percent focused on Windows: We have invested billions of dollars in it. We have created Office for the Mac but--and I thought I had been clear on this already when I said 'No'--we have no plans at this time to build Office on Linux,' Nick McGrath, Microsoft's head of platform strategy said.'
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Been using crossover for years now. Works great, just a couple of little funky keyboard issues. I actually ssh -X my fedora wine session onto my Sun Workstation. Best of all three worlds.
Microsoft has not given the right for OO to use doc format... and they are NOT using doc format. They are using something has been reversed engineered from doc! It is not fully compatible with Office doc format... it is not the same thing.
Meh.
I think you'd find legit professionals would acquire copies legally. I wouldn't mind running it if it worked natively on my amd64 running gentoo ;-)
To somehow suggest that as soon as it hits Linux everyone will pirate it, perhaps you think because all Linux users are criminals??? is just plain stupid.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
I've a longer memory than most here.
Microsoft extended its contract with Apple to keep Office current on Macs NOT for the unit sales, but because, at the time, they were litigating the monolopy case in court. They needed Apple to stay alive to keep up the pretense that they were engaging an open market without recourse to any monopoly (which was nonsense - they lost). Bill also invested a bunch of cash in Apple at the same time for the same reason: Bill needed Apple alive, not crushed, so that Microsoft could make a case against a finding of monopoly.
Now that Linus is around, Office's days on the Mac may be numbered. They aren't needed any more. But, I think Bill prefers the devil he knows to the devil which is free and open sourced. He'll keep Apple alive as long as he can, even though he lost the monopoly ruling, because the alternative is all Linux and OpenOffice.
Office for Mac lagging behind? You're kidding, right? Have you even used it. It is what Office2k4 for Winblows should be. It's responsive, intuitive and stable.
Before you wag your tongue, open your eyes.
There's only one reason I use fat32, and that's to format my 300gb ub2 hd. If I want cross compatibility between windows and linux, fat32 is the only way to do that. If I format to NTFS I cannot write to the drive and all my files are labeled read-only (which is really annoying when you have to copy over many files). If I format to Ext2, Ext3, microsoft will not read those partitions.
Interesting thing is that micrsoft PURPOSELY BREAKS FAT32 in windows!!! I forget the exact size, but you can only format a fat32 partition up to 30gb in windows. Microsoft really wants you using their proprietary ntfs file system. As a result I have to format fat32 from linux to utilize the whole capacity of the drive.
This is simply another case of microsoft trying to force proprietary software onto people that want nothing to do with their product.
Try "re-written".
Linux and Windows are completely two different software archetectures - Linux is focused around client-server connections using terminals (some of which are incapable of instantly distinguishing ESC from some other keypress without looking ahead) and has "perfected" that system. On the other hand, Windows is focused on a local user interface and has "perfected" that system - you can do almost anything in Windows just by using the base API.
Consider trying to write a truly portable C program - the advice given on news:comp.lang.c is to stick with the ANSI standard - which doesn't support any GUIs, mouse interfaces, networking, multi-threading or any other stuff that would make a modern operating system. Because of this, both MS, and POSIX either are or have different extensions to the operating system. Of these two, MS attempts to implement everything in their windowing system (including delay systems, timers, GDI, clipboard, and other stuff.), and POSIX extended networking, logon and file-system features.
Both systems are not complete at one time - Windows 3.0 didn't have builtin TCP/IP support, and required installation of a special package that interfaced with a modem, and used IPC to allow other applications to use the internet. On the other hand, POSIX was extended by XWindows and other stuff.
Right now, MS has merged various OS extensions into the main product (e.g. external WinSocks were replaced by an MS implementation.) However, I haven't seen much change in the basic Linux or POSIX API, aside from third party extensions (such as SDL.)
According to Frank's Corner you can run both MS Office and Internet Explorer on the Linux desktop. And...he shows you how.
Implementing it corporate wide would be the real trick...
http://www.microsoft.com/mscorp/ip/tech/fat.asp
The patents listed in the above web page:
5,579,517, filed 1995-4-24, granted 1996-11-26.
5,758,352, filed 1996-9-5, granted 1998-5-26.
6,286,013, filed 1997-1-28, granted 2001-9-4.
All of these patents appear to be related to VFAT, i.e. mapping long filenames and the original 8+3 short filenames into a common name-space. Although the filing dates are different and the title for one is slightly different, the abstract for each appears to be exactly the same.
I haven't examined the claims in each patent, so I don't know how these patents differ. It might be interesting to determine what is new in the 2nd and 3rd patents, since they were filed as long as 21 months after the 1st one. I wonder what wasn't in the original VFAT implementation? Bug fixes or features?
But, these patents don't appear to cover the "old" FAT filesystem: they address the later addition of long filenames. Again, IANAL, but I think that someone that confines themselves to the original FAT format (without long filenames) would have no need to license it from Microsoft.
The filesystem is just one part in preventing fragmentation.
(Note to mods: this isn't damning ReiserFS, but informing others about other methods of preventing fragmentation. Don't kill me. Thanks)