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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.'
The sky is still blue.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
'No'--we have no plans at this time to build Office on Linux
Too bad, I was looking for something other than DVD::RIP and distributed.net which would hammer both cores of my Athlon64 X2.
Trolling is a art,
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
...I guess I will just have to fork over the cash for OpenOffice
...wait a second..
xao
http://TheHillforum.hopto.org
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
There was a typo:
Microsoft is 100 percent focused on Windows: We have earned billions of dollars in it.
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,
From the story - "Microsoft is 100 percent focused on Windows: We have invested billions of dollars in it. We have created Office for the Mac"
Ummmm...how can you be 100 percent focused on Windows and still develop Office for the Mac?
Maybe he meant "Microsoft is 99 percent focused on Windows". Or, more likely, he meant to say "Microsoft is focused 100 percent against developing Office for Linux."
The future is open.
Meh.
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 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
no MS office, really?... well who in the hell cares? afterall we already have OOo etc.
If MS Office did get a linux release, where would that leave the development of OOo etc?
Accept the 80/20 rule (80% of users only use 20% of functionality), and the difference's between them are neglibile, while encouring people to use linux (sometimes without a LART too), it is a very rare occasion when an average home user can not sit down and user OOo with no problem.
Personally, they can keep it, and as long as they do im happy to see more F/OSS alternative's in development
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.
considering how many times this has come up over the years and how many stories on slashdot have been focused on this exact topic, this is obviously not 100% clear.
One must conjecture that there is something preventing this from being summarily dispelled...
[tinfoil hat]like an internal group that maintains a port of Office to Linux and other unix variants?[/tinfoil hat]
Let's recap our history:
There is no OSX on Intel
There is no iTunes phone
There is no Palm running Windows
Amiga is making a comeback
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.
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.
According to the attorney, a patent application must be submitted within 1 year after the first public disclosure of the invention, which can include:
I spent a good portion of my vacation dealing with some of the last minute paperwork, because it happened to coincide with the 1-year deadline.
So, I don't understand how Microsoft can be attempting to patent FAT now. Unless they started much earlier, or are trying to patent recent modifications to FAT, I don't think there is really anything to fear.
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.
It predates the appearance of Windows itself, back when Microsoft was a small company, and not a small nation. Excel was a direct competitor to Lotus 1-2-3, and Word competed with Word Perfect. At the time, Microsoft was actually smaller and less influential than either of those two companies. I remember when Excel use to come with a "Windows Run-Time", which ran from a DOS command line, and gave you (more or less) the Excel we've come to know. When you exited, you were looking at that "C:>" prompt again.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
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.
Nobody expects Microsoft!! Our two weapons are Office and our Windows monopoly. Wait ... three ... our three weapons are Office, our Windows monopoly, and our fanatical devotion to Bill Gates ... no ... amongst our weapons are Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt, Office, our Windows monopoly, and our fanatical devotion to Bill Gates. Cardinal Balmer, bring out ... the virtual machine!!
[Insert pithy quote here]
9 times out of 10, Notepad.exe will run on Wine. :-)
...what the answer will be but...
:-)
It's fun to make them say the word "Linux" over and over again
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
"Microsoft is 100 percent focused on Windows: We have invested billions of dollars in it."
Okay so you are focused, but your lenses are thick and your field of vision is small. If you have invested billions of dollars in it, why all the spaghetti code in the background after making several document/spreadsheet changes? Why all the security holes? Why does it include clippy the annoying pest?
For billions in investment, it better be able to do voice recoginition, layout my spreadsheets automatically, and do my laundry.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
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'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.
"Microsoft's head of platform strategy"? Sounds like a marketing position doesn't is. Well I guess you could never say M$ was run by engineers, run by weenies is more like it. How hard would it be to port Office for OSX to linux? You see this is where marketing knowledge comes in handy, they know few would buy it and those that did would be using it to reduce or eliminate windows desktops. Too bad the DOJ did not force them to do it.
btw, Without OpenDocument who wants it?
"So I think Microsoft is about as likely to create MS Office for Linux as the USA is likely to sell F-16 fighters to Iran."
Well, it almost happened, it was just a matter of months. They were the only country to got F14 before that.
#include "coucou.h"
(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....
PFY: "I submitted a "trial balloon" to a popular tech news website, saying we were never going to offer Office on Linux, just to test the water." /." /.!!!"
...Chair flies out of window.
Ballmer: "Were the Linux zealots pissed? Please tell me they were pissed."
PFY: "Um, no, they didn't seem to care really."
Ballmer: "Tell me the site wasn't
PFY: "Well, actually..."
Ballmer: "I am going to F**KING kill that
Someone help this poor ole country boy understand something.
Why would anybody in the open source community give two shits about putting Office on linux when theres such a push by the open source community to extend the office apps on windows?
Granted, I did not RTFA, but who is the person who is asking Ballmer to make Office for linux? Does that just not fly in the face of the entire mindset of the open source movement?
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.
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...
Microsoft is 100 percent focused on Windows ... We have created Office for the Mac
hmmm ...
1) person A invests 25 million $$$ into research to find out if smth really works, makes an investment to produce the stuff and hopes he gets his money back in 10 years, since he is concerned for the brand, he makes sure he hires loyal and qualified staff.
2) person B copies his work, adds a blue border to it, sells it for a lower price (because he doesnt have to cover the research costs), uses chinese illegal workers to make things even cheaper. gets profit.
3) person A goes bankrupt, his investment backfires and backfires on the reason that he was the "stupid" one that covered the research costs.
4) nobody wants to do any real research anymore cause there is no chance it will pay off.
we have no inventions, society get screwd.
imho patents should protect profit making stuff from other profit makers, whereas the free stuff producers could ignore the patents. (meaning linux dudes could play around with patented stuff as long as the linux people dont charge for the patented stuff, whereas microsoft cant steal from ibm to make profit).
I'd tell you the chances of this story being a dupe, but you wouldn't like it.
Here's a clue for ya... The most fundamental improvements in everything were when everyone wasn't patent-happy. In fact, Patents as we have them are a recent thing- only about 250 years old. The current thinking on Patents is actually only about 20 or so old. It doesn't help things. In some cases, it actually HURTS things.
Patents do not guarantee protection on your IP - You've got to have the money in hand to successfully mount a legal offensive to defend the IP, be it Copyright or Patent.
Patents do not guarantee that you have every angle solidly held. It takes a good attorney (more cash...) and care to not make the initial filings on something overbroad. If it's overbroad, it'll get overturned if there's a request to review- almost every time.
Patents only work within the confines of countries that honor them. If they don't, they protect nothing. If you don't file them in various places, even the ones that honor them may not protect you because you've not filed in all the right places (more money yet again...).
Basically, a Patent is a mixed bag- it all depends on what you're talking about. In the case of the stuff I've got pending, it's relevent, but we're still going to have to have the money to defend the Patent. Some of the stuff that people like Bill and Co., and Bezos are filing are BOGUS and are part of the problem. They don't do anything but put Patent Attorneys on payroll.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
As for the office suite - We have Google on our side in this battle. Go, Google, go!
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"!!!
From article:
This doesn't sound like a out-and-out rejection of the patent, which the headline led me to believe. It looks like Microsoft will be able to keep this patent with a little more work...
No. MSIE for Mac was definitely a steaming pile of dog crap. I am a professional web designer, and I worked in the Mac Lab in my university. Trust me, when I tell you that.
Patent: from Latin patere, to be open