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.'
Why should Microsoft build applications for an operating system directly competing with their own?
Heck, I wouldn't even build notepad for Linux if I thought it would cause people to leave my main product.
Cogito Ergo Sum
SAMBA doesn't have anything to do with FAT, for one.
In addition, the US (the only place these patents could apply) doesn't have statutory licensing fees for patents. At most Microsoft could enjoin US users from using the vfat modules, so Red Hat and Novell would stop building them into their kernels.
Wow.
IANAL, all that.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
"Microsoft is 100 percent focused on Windows"
Guess what Buster, ever heard of Xbox and MacBU? Those departments are most certainly not focused on Windows.
- Henrik
- when the Shadows descend -
I can see this not happening for three reasons:
:D
One is the same reason that it looks like Mac Office lags slightly behind the Windows version, and that is the use of Office to try and persuade people to use/stay with Windows. Much as many people on Slashdot seem to dislike Office, it's certainly a widely liked application for many businesses and individuals (I quite like Outlook and Word, although I hate Excel and loathe Powerpoint), so making the Windows version the best of the range is an easy win to get customers on the Windows bandwagon.
Secondly, any porting of flagship apps like Office to Linux would seem to be a vindication of it as an alternative platform to Windows, and MS can't be seen to acknowledge it as a potential comptetitor...
The third reason, possibly the most relevant given the weight of opinion on this site, is that the Linux market's known antipathy to Windows for ideological reasons, technical reasons, and economic reasons (many free, Free and open alternatives!) would make the cost of porting far outweigh potential revenues.
Game dev and music blog
The summary covers two completely unrelated topics. One is the USPTOs rejection of Microsoft's attempt to extort the digital camera/USB stick makers (which is really what patenting FAT was about). The other story is about how Microsoft Office will never appear on Linux - so what, we don't want it.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
Seriously - The linux market share on business desktops is still miniscule, and companies who would go out of their way (Yes, it's easier to stick with Windows) to use it would be likely candidates for alternatives such as OpenOffice.org. This means that they would be spending time releasing a product for a competing operating system that would likely gain them little to no profits for what gain? Slightly legitimizing their only real threat (however small it is). Does anyone really think they *should* release their suites to Linux? Does anyone on Linux really want it anyhow? I think any amount of market research shows that its simply not an idea worth implementing, let alone even think about.
"If you put butter and salt on it, it tastes like salty butter." -Terry Pratchet, on Popcorn.
In other news...The sky is still blue.
/.
Exactly. I can't see how this could be much of a surprise to anyone. However if Microsoft said they were going to build Office for Linux, then that would warrant some surprise and an article on
Why on Earth would Microsoft develop their main cash cow for an operating system they'd just assume quietly go away? Not only would they lose money one it, but they'd be showing support for Linux in a way that they're not ready to do (yet).
It's kind of too bad that they won't release Office for Linux because it would probably bolster the business and consumer desktop market shares. Honestly (aside from any closed-document arguments), MS Office is the best office suite available right now. It's incredibly powerful (think Excel if nothing else), and very intuitive. Open Office is nice, but still not in the same park as Office. Give it some time though; as Linux grows in popularity, Microsoft will be forced to start paying it this sort of attention.
"What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
/)
Those costs are sunk costs. Only incremental costs over incremental benefits makes sense... Although that kind of thinking amy explain MS's current woe's
I don't blame Bill for this one. Why develop and market a product that is targeted at users who fundamentaly, and religiously, hate your company. It's like selling bibles in bagdad.
Open source is not automatically better than closed source. If Apple released a free version of OS X for intel, do you really think people would care if it is open or not? Sure, there is a good few people who try to use open source wherever possible, but most of the public (and companies) dont really care about open or closed, they care about price and if it does the job. The latter is why MS wont release office for Linux, because currently full compatability with office is one of the last few things stopping companies switching all their pcs over.
Paul
We would quite possibly have MSOffice (and all sorts of other apps) for Linux today, because the apps division would only care about selling their apps as widely as possible.
Sigh.
how is it that OO supports it for opening and saving?....how is this legal
How is it illegal? Twenty years ago everyone would have laughed at the very notion that a file format could be patented or that you would need some kind of permission to merely read it (or write it). Especially to read/write your own data!
Years of conditioning by Microsoft, RIAA, MPAA, and others have gotten us into the default mentality that anything that is not expressly permitted must be forbidden. It took court cases to affirm our right to make cassette tapes of our LP's for our cars. If they tell us that we can't/shouldn't do something (reverse engineer, decompile, play your own DVD, etc.) (e.g. the EULA), then it must be so. If it isn't so, then they'll purchase legislation to make it so.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
Ding Ding Ding!
MS Office + IE are the desktop to many people in Corporate America. If you could run those on Linux, there would be almost no reason to run windows. Windows just acts as a carrier horse for that suite and "the internet"
Of course, maybe Microsoft will suddenly stop wanting to sell Windows, because, y'know, its too much work.
"If you put butter and salt on it, it tastes like salty butter." -Terry Pratchet, on Popcorn.
Office is a huge application suite, taking millions of man-hours to create. To write it for Linux would not take significantly less time than it does for Windows, yet the market for it is significantly less. In fact, a Linux version would take significantly longer because Linux doesn't have facilities already present in Windows, such as OLE and VBA.
Not only that, but support would be a nightmare because every user would not only have a different configuration, but a completely different kernel. Guys like Oracle can dictate hardware and software requirement because people spec out systems just to run those programs, but Office has to run on whatever the user has already got.
And to top it off, this is software for a free operating system. People who run it are often not willing to pay for software or hate Microsoft.
How many Linux users are there who would pay $500 for Office to run only on a standard (say, FC3) distro? How many of those could just run it under WINE?
dom
Part of their focus on Windows is deflecting as much anti-trust scrutiny as possible. By ensuring that a token competitor remains marginally viable, they are helping to lower the risk that their Windows business will face further legal attacks.
By picking a token competitor that shares their closed-source business model, they avoid the appearance of validating alternative business models that threaten the profit margins that they've traditionally been able to command. That's why you see them selling Mac products but not Linux products.
The Office codebase has a limited future lifecycle. They need a replacement for generic thin clients, for better team-ware support, etc. In the meanwhile, to make any progress on desktops, Unix and GNU/Linux vendors need an Office-like, Office-more-or-less-compatible replacement.
The Unix and GNU/Linux vendors pay for a (conservatively estimated) 100 employees to keep OpenOffice going. So, that's like 8 - 12 million dollars a year, still trying to catch up to a MSFT bread-and-butter product that MSFT itself sees as something they themselves need to leapfrog within the next few years.
Any revenues MSFT might get from making a Linux version available are going to have a hard time helping their position to a greater degree than that 8-12 million hurts their enemies, now and into the future. So the decision not to support Office on Linux is determined by heavy FOSS investment in a dead-from-the-start alternative, mostly by Sun but with plenty of ancillary investment to spread around among other MSFT competitors. It's a no-brainer, really.
-t
1) Person A makes something. :-(
:-( You know, with competition, and a free market, and everything.
:-(
:-(
2) Person B uses that idea to make something better.
3) Person A sues the pants off Person B, and further witholds the right to compete for two decades (patents), a century (copyrights), or indefinately (trademarks)
Society suffers.
Why not:
1) Person A makes something.
2) Person B uses that idea to make something better.
3) Person A competes by making something still better.
Society benefits.
No, wait... that would be actual capitalism.
*sigh* Instead, we live in a world where making your own improved version of something and selling it is a crime. Build a better mousetrap, and you'll be sued for IP violation by the old mousetrap companies!
There's no such thing as private innovation anymore; if you can't afford a team of lawyers, you don't have any rights.
If MS ported Office to Linux, they could take quite a bit of market share away from Open Office -- which would ultimately help them hold down the fort against the OO insurgency in Windows. Instead, they will try to ignore Linux and hope it goes away. It won't. By the time they realize this, OO will become the only serious choice for Linux users. As Linux ramps up on the desktop, people will begin to wonder... "Linux users are getting office software for free. If it works for them, why should I bother paying Microsoft? Oh, they have it for Windows too? I should go try it." Nothing stops people from thinking this way today, but there will be MORE of them doing it in the future.
When you consider all the companies who resort to offshore outsourcing, it becomes clear that we have an insatiable appetite for IT cost savings and we will try almost ANYTHING to save money. Ditching Microsoft is a new frontier of [relatively] unexplored savings opportunities. If MS doesn't hurry up and carve out a niche in the Linux world, they will unintentionally accellerate the maturity of OO as a viable replacment for MS Office. Of the two "monopoly" products, the Office market is more profitable and more sustainable than the Windows OS.
It does not run on the same hardware, yet...
And it will probably require non trivial cracking to run on not mac-produced hardware even in the future, when mac start shipping mac os X for x86
(There may be holes in my chain of logic; feel free to correct.) I'm no super-geek when it comes to Windows, but if MS were successful in their patenting of FAT, I think that would mean that hardware makers--portable music players, flash drives, etc.--would no longer be allowed to format their internal memory with FAT. Right? If so, would they switch to something other format (other than NTFS, I'm assuming)? And if they do that, they are suddenly outside Windows' supported filesystems. And if so, wouldn't that hurt Windows or at least force them to admit that there are better filesystems out there... even ones that do not have fragmentation? GASP! Or would the hardware companies just continue making FAT products and pay MS their royalties? It seems (sadly) that this would be the case, since most of the people buying products are using Windows. But it also would be incredibly cool if someone rocked that boat and opened up the stage for more filesystems supported. As for me, I'll just keep using ReiserFS on Linux. Saves me a lot of time not having to defrag....
Judge Jackson was incredibly perceptive in his judgement in USDOJ vs Microsoft and it is unfortunate that the appeals court chose to ignore him. The problem with FAT is that every single flash card manufacturer implemented FAT as the file system for their cards. They didn't chose it on techincal merit, FAT doesn't have any technical merit. The only reason it was chosen war that FAT is the only file system that is guaranteed to be present in every Microsoft OS. If these patents are allowed to stand, you can forget about taking pictures with your spiffy new 8Mpixel camera and mounting the pictures in your Linux box and you can forget about mounting it as a USB drive too. Unless your camera vendor provides ext2 or some Linux software to read it (fat chance), you are going to have to own a Windows box to get your pictures transfered. The card manufacturers could have come up with their own file system optimized for flash, or use one that was unencumbered like the Berkeley Fast File system, but unless Microsoft bundled support for it, it would be totally pointless, and Microsoft would be just as willing to do that as they are to implement OpenDocument. This is exactly the kind of innovation that never occurred simply because it wasn't in Microsoft's best interest to allow it to occur, and they are going to continue to fight tooth and nail to make sure it doesn't now.
Microsoft is 100 percent focused on Windows ... We have created Office for the Mac
If Microsoft were smart, they WOULD write office for linux, but not for the reasons most people here would think...
Given Microsoft's normal tactics, I would expect they would do it to:
1) Kill OpenOffice, which if left to thrive over on linux will eventually also eat into their windows market (they are obviously worried about this - see earlier articles involving the state of Massachusettes).
2) Control the user's typical experience with linux. They could make Office a steaming pile of dog crap on linux, but people would still buy it. Microsoft could basically control your average manager's impression of linux by making Office for Linux a dog. Those managers who had the misfortune of being stuck with this at the advice of some linux-zealot in their IT department would never listen to that zealot again.
I'm GLAD they haven't realized this and decided to make office for linux. Of course, they might be secretly working on it already, because this is not the kind of thing Microsoft would want to pre-announce. They only pre-annouce vaporware when they need to chill the market for their competitors who are ahead of them.
This has been your daily dose of conspiracy. Now back to your regular microsoft-bashing.
Or more succinctly, getting support for it in Corporate America would be the trick.
Rule #1 -- Politics always trumps technology.
Imagine ten people putting in 1 hour each every day on the project. They put in one hour of work, but because they share the end results they get nine hours of "other peoples work" for free. It sounds unfair: get nine hours of work for doing one hour. But it obviously is not.
That's the payoff. It's always been the payoff, that and whatever can be made from packaged distribution. Donations are a nice icing to the cake, but anyone who uses Linux or Firefox or OpenOffice or Apache in their day to day life has no call to turn up the guilt level if they don't get sent any.
For the love of God, please learn to spell "ridiculous"!!!
But for non-geeks the biggest motivator for going to Linux/OpenOffice has got to be cost. On an OEM machine, the cost of the OS is secondary to the cost of getting an Office license. I think in an earlier article about OS-free systems from Dell it was pointed out that the OS-free systems were only $30 less than a comparable system with Windows.