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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."
I wonder what kind of impact Microsoft hopes to achive by doing this. I would guess they belive that when more software can use their format they will create the standard. But the thing is, they allready do this sort of.
I for one don't see how opening a file format so engaraved in society that it has become a standard for non-geeks can make an additiona revenue.
Where's the catch? There must be one! As far as I know, MS hasn't been in trouble over their office suite w/the ftc, why would they do this?
So.. Will they really open everything, or just wrap their proprietary implementation inside XML and therefore claim their format is "open"?
I hope they really open up the format. Otherwise it'd be as bad as RIAA promoting DRM "for freedom". Sigh.
The article doesn't address the patent issue at all and whether it will be possible to implement the standards in Free Software.
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.
Ecma's wiki and site seems to be pretty much confirm that they're composed of manufacturer members. I wouldn't consider them the equivalent of ANSI or UL. 18 months of work by a collusive industry is more throwing those governments a bone than actually getting the work done right.
I guess there should be some applause for getting the ball rolling. Uphill?
So . . . they're planning to submit the XML standard for approval? Or are they just hoping somebody will write a free converter to port all of the crufty old MS-Office .DOCs over to a reasonably portable form of XML?
Oh, well - seems like they're trying to do the right thing. To the men and women of Redmond I say: keep up the good work! Oh, and adopt a motto, like "Don't be evil." ;^D
Am I the only one who fears they will never implement OpenDocument support, but rather 'open' their proprietary formats?
But just what are they opening? The new XML formats? Or the binary sludge formats?
I tried the free mail hosting with one of my rarely used domains. In the end, you end up with a Hotmail front-end -- you literally log into Hotmail (well, Passport actually), but rather than having a login id of 'john.smith@hotmail.com' you have 'john.smith@mydomainname.com' (you can use whatever user id format you like). Otherwise, it looks and feels like Hotmail -- including text advertisements at the bottom of any email you send. I assume the Outlook integration that Hotmail offers also works, but I did not try this. Mail boxes are limited to 250MB, and you can have 20 of them (IIRC).
If nothing else, it was extremely to set up, assuming you can easily change your domain's MX record.
Yes, it's true. This man has no dick.
My first question, and likely that of many others, was: "Why are they doing this?"
Well, according to TFA, it's because of the European Commission has been urging companies to open up their document formats, and Microsoft feared the EC would stop using Microsoft's formats for the creation of public documents, and urge national governments to do the same.
So, thumbs up for the EU on this one!
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
"open source definately has had a major effect on the industry over its lifetime"
MS has certainly taken notice. But let's face it, this move is just one more misdirection in their shell game. If they had any intention of playing fair, they would have started before now.
They'll use this to convince governments to stick with MSOffice and that everything will be fine because the formats will be open. But as soon as OpenOffice has the format covered, MSWord will start hiding the document's content inside some secret extension. They've been using dirty tricks for 30 years so I'd be more than a little surprised if they stopped tomorrow.
Open Source has helped to expose them as dishonest proprietors. Now it must expose them as Open Source imposters.
Does anyone believe that M$ is willingly going to do this without some subtle sabatoge plan?
Anyone want to speculate how they plan on making this worthless?
According to one Microsoft guy, Microsoft is removing the royalty-free license requirment and instead is issuing an irrevocable commitment not to suethat says they won't ever sue you.
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http://blogs.msdn.com/brian_jones/archive/2005/11
"The move is being supported by a number of organizations including Apple Computer, Barclays Capital, BP, Intel and Toshiba."
Since when is BP included with the likes of Apple and Intel?
Seems strange that BP's opinion matters in this subject.
[T]he format is free to use. In his next post, Brian points out that the license is perpetual; that is, it cannot be changed once granted.
We've seen other such licenses that have turned out to be very misleading. For example, if I use the license and write software that implements the specs, can I legally sell my software? The fact that I have a license doesn't mean that I can pass the license on to others in my products.
There are lots of potential legal gotchas in a lot of "free" licenses. Given MS's history, a bit of paranoia is in order here. We need people suggesting ways that they can turn around and sue us into bandruptcy if we use their specs. Then we need assurances that they won't sue us in any of those ways. And we need lawyers looking at the assurances and telling us whether they're legally meaningful, or whether we might get sued anyway.
After all, consider the RIAA. Who'd have ever thought that someone could be sued for buying a recording, sticking it into their own sound equipment and playing the music? But that's happening these days. We've even just had a story of recordings that intentionally damage our playing equipment when we attempt to play the music.
Paranoia here is quite appropriate.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
They are fully and openly specifying how to write all of the Office formats. While this is good, it does nothing for the other important half which is reading. They clearly don't want all applications to perfectly files generated by some software. This tatic seems to guarentees that at least one product will "clean" as well as special Office formats: Office itself.
I suppose people can take the information on how to write a valid "clean" Office format to make better format translators but we are still hosed for various random files that will be generated and only readible in sanctioned applications.
Clearly, the future will be based on whuffie.
Adobe has been doing it for years with the PDF format, and most people are ok with it.
Keeping control over the evolution of the format but having the specs fully open so as to allow completely compatible products is a good thing, I myself would appreciate it if MS did that.
"The way we can tell it's C# instead of Haskell is because it's nine lines instead of two." -- wadler
Well, on the admittedly limited chance that you're not trolling, and that instead you'll actually consider a reasoned response with an open mind, I'll try one more time. First, yes, we "idiots" do know exactly what we're talking about, so I honestly hope you'll bother to read and possibly even learn something.
The fine example you gave is a trivially simple and quite static format, similar to an image. It is far from complex and dynamic enough to describe any useful arbitrary document. If you'd actually re-read the post to which you replied, you'd find a much more relevant example, that of HTML. HTML can't be described as a basic C-style structure like your example, but a formal grammar such as BNF (or a DTD for XHTML) could be used. However, you can very easily omit many optional flags/features when describing how to write a valid document in any such format. As noted, I might only tell you only about the head, title, and body tags, and perhaps the h1-h7 tags as well.
Is it possible for me to neglect to tell you about all the other formatting tags (like b and i and friends) and even "forget" to mention the whole hyperlink concept with the "a" tag? Sure it is. Can you write a valid document? Sure you can. Now, can you really read all possible documents, including those that use the tags I so conveniently neglected to describe? No.
Let's even use your own example, with a modification:
long version 0x0100
long number of strings 0x0002
long string length
string
long string length
string
long number of options 0x0001
int option_num
int option_length
byte [] option_data
EOF
Here you see that I've told you how and where to add multiple options. However, I've not told you what options are valid. I might only tell you about some of the options and not others. You can always still write a document given that format, but you can't read all documents unless you've been told all the possible valid options.
So, really I hope this hasn't been a waste of time, and that you can see that Microsoft can choose to give out any arbitrary amount of detail for how to write a proper and valid document, without giving sufficient tools with which to parse all possible valid documents.
They're opening their file formats because they still has a trump card. Or has anyone forgotten about this?
A quick patch or two to Microsoft Office (now one of their biggest or the biggest ca$h cow - 1/3 of their profits?) and MS Office suddenly reads|writes XML format only. They aren't about castrating themselves voluntarily. They still have shareholders to keep happy, but more importantly, they want to be the trendsetters, no matter what.
How does this impact Open Office? Open Office can then read the XML Format because it's declared in the patent. But what O^2 won't be able to do is write the MS Office XML Format [except to violate the patent]. This means: no interoperability and any business which wants to migrate away from a closed system (MS Office) to Open Office can do so only as a one-way trip, burning the bridge behind them. And the company can't communicate both directions, so that forces a move en masse.
An openly documented office file format is a step in the right direction.
But I think the bigger problem with MS Office is that the file format itself is horrid. From what I can gather, it's a cross between a raw object dump and a virtual memory cache.
This would explain why even MS Office can't reliably read its own documents, and why reverse engineering has been so slow and difficult.
In Microsoft Word 2.0, if you were editing a file on a floppy disk, and you swapped the floppy for another one (e.g. to copy text out of another file) without closing Word, then Word crashed and your doc file was trashed. I reckon the reason the file was trashed is that Word was using it as a swap file.
The same bug exists in Word 2002, released 10 years later. It happened to me when a network drive disconnected.
The fact that so many people rely on such a fragile file format is holding a lot of things back. How can anyone build on shifting sand? The sooner its replaced with something decent the better.
Imagine if digital cameras all used a closed image file format. A lossy format like JPEG, except that instead of discarding details humans don't notice, the format loses information that humans really care about. And instead of compressing data, it expands it.
I think a lot fewer people would enjoy using digital cameras if they worked that way.
Of course the file format is only the tip of the iceberg. There are substantial features in Word that are so broken that users quickly learn it's not worth using them. Other features are so unpredictable that they effectively discourage editing and experimentation. Expert users subconciously avoid features that cause problems.
I reckon the overall productive uptime with Word is about 90% - 95%, depending on the job at hand and the user. That's not too bad until you multiply 5% downtime by several hundred million daily users.
The quandry is that people won't be motivated to switch until something comes along that is both compatible and yet significantly improved. It's hard to be compatible with a dodgy file format, and projects like OpenOffice.org seem to be more of the same but open. It reminds me of the ponderous Mozilla browser. Mozilla and OOo are excellent projects, but what's needed is something like Firefox that strips off the barnacles, is open source so people can build on it, works roughly the way that people are used to, and yet simpler, faster and more reliable.
There are 5 billion literate people in the world. Isn't it time we had a writing tool that doesn't suck?
Haven't RTFA but if it only covers how to write a legal file then it likely does not include rendering (how to draw it on the screen / to a printer) nor how to read / write efficiently, either.
It may well be that only MS Office 5.0 or whatever is opened. And let's not talk about Excel cells, or those line drawings in Word that never seem to come out right in OOo.
Only if MS promises to now and forever provide immediately, online a fully open reference implementation and spec for all the formats used throughout Office, including the interfaces for embedding, publishing, accessing etc.. then can it be called open. Of course it will still be to their advantage even if they made a 100% total commitment to this, the question is only how little do they have to do to meet EU regulator approval. I have little faith in regulators, a bit more perhaps for Boston and other municipalities/countries that are requiring use of a non-MS open standard.
The most useful thing for companies right now would be for MS to provide an open source tool that lets them read their tons of old word documents into a database. That isn't going to happen while MS is in a war with Google. And that's why it is only about writing files, and also why as long as Google aims at the desktop there will only be a bare minimum of the way Office really works being implemented.
And how about a tool to convert heavily VB scripted tools into OOo or perl? No, these massive investments are the momentum that keeps the corporate world firmly in MS' pants. Not this decade.
No, they almost certainly do not have any documentation except for the Word source code. It is pretty obvious that Word format is a mess of back compatability and forgotten hacks by hundreds of different programmers. Microsoft would like to get rid of it as much as everybody else, if they could replace it with a well-designed but obscured format.
The amount of man YEARS of work needed to write this documentation, especially compared with the week or so that would be needed to do a half-assed read/write support of ODF, is staggering. Another indication that Microsoft is scared out of their minds that some people might use ODF by default.
Not sure if you are aware of this, but the idea of a patent is to show the details of your invention (which can be seen as opening up the standard in this case) and register it with the US patent office(or whichever patent office) to protect it. Now the fact that they are declaring it as a standard format is irrelevant, they do own the patent and can do whatever the law says they can with it. http://developers.slashdot.org/users.pl Create an Account Many patented standards have been documented for public use but are still protected by patents and thus require licensing. The CDMA cell phone network is a good example of this. All the low level signal specifications and circuitry requirements for digital communication between CDMA devices is well known and thoroughly documented. It's widely recognized as one of the larger cell phone network standards. However, you still cannot develop CDMA devices without first getting a license from Quallcomm which owns the patents. Just recently in fact, Quallcomm was suing Nokia for developing CDMA devices without the proper licensing. Similarily, Microsoft can open up the internal details of their office format (they have to do this to patent their format anyways) and still require developers license their format if they wish to use it.
Right, and this is at the heart of my point: It SUCKS to be a computer programmer in this new world. Especially one where IP is devalued.
:-)
I am not sure about that.
Yes, one can take it to India, China, or wherever, but there is always value of hiring locally
Secondly, the COTS vendors can take it to India, China, or wherever too so this is not unique to the FOSS world. So offshoring is a non-issue and is no different with COTS or FOSS.
So what is the difference? Money in your pocket. Like if you worked for Microsoft.
If you work for Microsoft today, you show up to work, get paid a salary, and go home.
If you want to start your own company with no VC, you show up for work, go home, and repeat until you have a product (living off of savings I presume). Then you try to sell it and recoup the expense of your labor.
With FOSS, you show up to work, bill your client, and go home. You get money in your pocket just as if you worked for Microsoft.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Then don't be a computer programmer in this new world! Nobody said you had to be one. Or do be a computer programmer, but understand that you are not necessarily going to get paid just for programming. You do not have an automatic right to get paid for whatever you do. The sewage company do not pay me money everytime I take a dump in my toilet ..... I sometimes wish they would, but the simple fact is they don't need my shit that badly.
If Source Hoarding became illegal -- which I honestly hope it will in my lifetime -- you could always try eking out a living by charging people for independent source code audits.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!