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Microsoft to Open up Office Formats
Been on TV writes to tell us that Microsoft is expected to announce on Tuesday the opening of their Office file formats, according to Financial Times. From the article: "Microsoft will submit its Office file formats to Ecma International, the standards body, which will develop the documentation and make it available to the industry. The move is being supported by a number of organizations including Apple Computer, Barclays Capital, BP, Intel and Toshiba."
And how much of your soul will you have to sign away in order to use this?
2 cents,
Queen B
HDGary secures my bank
Call it what you want. But I imagine that open source definately has had a major effect on the industry over its lifetime. It has definately been worth all the effort. Despite what some may think.
See Internet Explorer/HTML...
Sigs are for the weak.
Ogg Vorbis, Png, and Odt benefit everyone, even the people who have never used any of these three formats. Ogg Vorbis benefits everyone because it stops Thomson from taking any legal action against the free Lame mp3 encoder and XMMS mp3 playback library; Thomson knows that if they have their lawyers even look at the Lame web page, the entire Open Source community will perform a mass exodus to the Ogg format.
.doc file format.
The PNG format, in addition to being far superior to GIF, kept Unisys from taking too much legal action against GIF; the little legal action they took increased cross-browser PNG compatibility to the point that people can safely put non-transparent PNG images on their web pages today.
Odt will benefit everyone because this format gives Microsoft a clear message to open up their
My take on this is that they have caught a lot of flak for not supporting open document. This way, they don't have to make any changes, and they don't have to support open document, but they'll still be supporting a document format that is open.
Now, many of the reasons for switching to open document will be nullified, and if Microsoft's doc becomes the standard, the burden will be on the OSS community to make changes to their software rather than the other way around.
Basically, it's MS's way of waying, "You want openness? Fine, but if we're going to play, we're going to play with our ball."
I think it would be awesome to see MS support an open standard. This seems like kind of a petty way to go about it, but that's the Microsoft we all love to hate, right?
This is going expose only a way to write to these formats. It says absolutely nothing about how to read documents created by their proprietary packages. It's much easier to say "here's how to create a valid document" without giving away all of the keys to the kingdom than it is to explain fully "here's how to read any document created by our suite" (and you have to presume they'll intentionally leave out the good stuff).
As far as I can tell, this is a no-op.
It seems odd that it will take 18 months to develop documentation for the file formats. Sure, the formats must be complex, but it seems like maybe this documentation organization might not be a truly independent standards body.
It's worse than that. Like RTF, they will change the formats arbitrarily with every revision of office, and will then probably take 18 months to document each new version. And of course they will claim this is complete openness and interoperability, ignoring that they're keeping 3rd parties 18 months behind...
... Ultimately, we'll see software and computing industry shift into a business model based on service alone. This way, competition is no longer a race to market the latest and greatest features -- it becomes a competition based upon who best serves the customer ...
...
Thank you for restating the theory and hope behind OSS, now for reality
MS had previously published Word and Excel formats. They did so as they took over the market, as they destroyed the competition. The competitions support for Word and Excel formats further reinforced those proprams as the defacto standards.
It will be interesting to see how "open" it really will be. The funny thing is I swear I've heard this before. Wasn't the big deal supposed to be how they were going to use XML and how this was going to allow them to place nicely with others?
I get the sense that Microsoft may take a security through obscurity approach with this. Make it a pain in the butt for somebody else to implement. Then keep adding new stuff to it so that there's always subtle incompatibilities with older software. A "open" format is of minimal value if third parties have to struggle to keep up with the standard.
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Lets put this PR spin through the reality filter.
1. Microsoft promising something 18 months down the road is meaningless. Hell, ANY tech company promising something 18 montsh out is meaningless.
2. This announcement is for Europe, without software patents.... for now. Of course if in 18 months there just HAPPEN to be software patents and said patents are licensed under their no-GNU terms... oh well, who wants to support smelly hippies anyway.
3. The only promised the ability to write, kida curious since most of the EU objections are about random folk being able to READ their government's output.
4. There is no committment to continue using this 'standardized' format in any future product. So there is nothing to provent them from releasing a future Office that uses an 'embraced and extended' version and either not documenting the changes at all or another 18 months after it ships.
Democrat delenda est
However, they wouldn't be waking up to this were there not a healthy looking and viable alternative in the form of OpenOffice, which, as well as delivering true ownership of the files, also provides (most of) the convenience, bells and whistles of the m$ software stable. So in that sense, open source is a driver of this pressure.
That's why I think the half-assed, quasi-open strategies discussed in some posts here do not present a real long-term option for m$ - once people are fully awake to the fact they don't really own their own data, only real open formats will solve m$'s marketing problem, and we'll see a real shift in the file-format landscape, of which this latest thing may be an early sign.
.sigs: Just Say No!
Microsoft has historically "embraced" open industry standards by adding proprietary extensions, making its user's data worthless outside of the MS world.
In this case, I suspect they'll end up releasing, but still maintaining control over the office formats. If not there already, they'll make sure there's the ability to store proprietary objects (or meta-data, or whatever the current popular nomenclature is) in the now "open" format. They'll then simply move on to placing more and more document content in these proprietary closed objects, while claiming they're using an "open format."
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Massachusetts did not go OSS. Massachussetts went open format (this also explains why PDF is an acceptable format too). The advantage is that vendors can compete with both closed and open solutions as long as the data they produce is in the open format.
--- I wish I could hear the soundtrack to my life. That way I'd know when to duck.
I can appreciate the count of "failed" and abandoned projects on SourceForge. By and large, they can be resurrected by anyone willing to do so. The open source world is not unique in this respect as there are probably thousands of shareware and freeware (not to mention commercial) programs that have been adandoned just since Win32 hit the street, not to mention since DOS hit the street. The critical difference is that in the majority of cases when a shareware or small commercial developer closes shop, the users are left with little recourse for further support.
At least F/OS Software is never truly dead. It may enter a state of dormancy or being a zombie, but it can always be brought back to life by anyone interested in doing so.
"Insanity is doing the same thing over again expecting a different result."