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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."
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
And:
-Will they allow changes in the standard after submission?
-Will they use those changed standards in their own products?
-Will they not release new formats until approved by the standards board?
One of the problems with OO.o, and a lot of other software that clones existing document formats, is that they're always late to the game. If Microsoft released Office 12 today with a new document format that no one has seen, even if it was immediately released to the standards body it would be months or years until an open source product could be released that would duplicate the format. As long as Microsoft leads, everyone else has no choice but to follow.
TW
I wonder what kind of impact Microsoft hopes to achive by doing this.
Fully documenting the Microsoft Office file formats and permissively licensing any essential patents could help dissuade governments from migrating to OASIS OpenDocument format, which happens to be the native format of a competing software package called OpenOffice.org 2.x.
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?
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...
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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Out of date. That refers to Microsoft's pseudo open format licensing. Specifically crafted to exclude GPLed software from legally using the formats. If this announcement tomorrow is supposed to mean that Massachusetts and the EU won't drop them, then it will have to drop the license terms that stop sub-licensing, such that GPL apps may use the formats. Anything less won't cut it.
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
I think you nailed the central problem: Unless MS also outlines an open process how new features are implemented to these Office Formats, they will still be perceived as "closed" because the world of office users will keep looking towards Microsoft for "guidance to the future" instead of looking towards a standard comittee for future changes.
From the license:
"Microsoft may have patents and/or patent applications that are necessary for you to license in order to make, sell, or distribute software programs that read or write files that comply with the Microsoft specifications for the Office Schemas."
and that's why this has never been acceptable to the open-source community.
Steven
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!
You've certainly come to the right place.
a standard != the standard
Just so you know, C# is standardized by the ECMA. Does that make it the only programming language in the world? Uuuh nope.
"The way we can tell it's C# instead of Haskell is because it's nine lines instead of two." -- wadler
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.