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A Set of RFI Responses for Sherlock Holmes

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the snooping-through-sniping dept.

Andy Updegrove writes "In early May, Massachusetts issued a 'Request for Information' on plugins that could help ease the transition from a Microsoft Office based environment to one relying on ODF compliant software. Now the seven responses received have been posted by the ITD: six from vendors large and small — and one from Microsoft that purports to be informational, but in fact gives no information beyond what is already publicly available. Like everything else in the ODF saga, many of the responses are as much political as technical, with some delivering off-topic messages, one (from the ODF Foundation, strangely) refusing to disclose much at all, and several contradicting each other on the technical challenge of working with Office absent further code disclosures by Microsoft. All in all, they make for an intriguing read on multiple levels — offering more of an Easter egg hunt than informative offering. It will be interesting to see which, if any, of these offerings the Mass. ITD decides to utilize."

4 of 57 comments (clear)

  1. Open? by neonprimetime · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Then there is the ODF Foundation's response, which somewhat surprisingly (to me, at least) begins awith the following Q& A:

    1. What is the present state of efforts to create ODF plug-ins or converters for Microsoft Office, whether undertaken by respondent or others through projects with which the respondent is familiar?

    This information is available under the terms of a confidentiality agreement.

    I guess in the land of Microsoft, an open door and a closed door are the same thing.

    1. Re:Open? by WhiteWolf666 · · Score: 4, Interesting

      There is no restriction for Development under the OpenSource licenses to be done in secret. It's distribution/sales that requires source code, not development.

      I suspect that the ODF doesn't want MS to break whatever APIs they are using for their plugin in Office 2007. Office 2007 is still _beta_ code. We've seen significant changes in the beta in the last few months, and theres nothing to stop these changes from occuring in the near future.

      I have no fears whatsoever that ODF will release the plugin under an open-source license. Furthermore, if you feel that you could do the actual development work, the format is avaliable for all to see; there's nothing sketchy going on here.

      Novell didn't release the XGL code until it was near-finished, because they a) wanted to WOW the world, b) didn't want to argue about their architectural decisions, and c) wanted to get it done by the SuSE PRO desktop release cycle for 10 (which hasn't occurred yet). There are other projects that operate under similar levels of secrecy; and there's _nothing_ wrong with that.

      You're free to develop Open Source code in secret. You're free to use Open Source code in secret (think Google). The only time you need to share the source, is when you distribute the binary. That's the beauty of the GPL. Want to use a heavily modified linux for your cruise missile guidance code?

      Fine. The only person you have to distribute it to is your customers, and they don't have to distribute it to anyone they don't want to. The essence of GPL style "freedom" is that when you get a piece of software, you get the guts of it, too; and you can redistribute any and all of it. GPL style "freedom" doesn't mean that the world as a whole gets your development time, or all the crap you strip out before you release your GPL code into the wild. It doesn't mean that a customer can demand all your alpha/beta versions before release, either. It just means that when you get a software "product", you get all the aspects of it, including distribution rights and source code.

      That's essentially why the GPL is compatible with capitalism.

      --
      WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
  2. A VB Macro Converter by srobert · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I think an example of what they had in mind when they made the RFI would be a VB Macro converter.
    I have some spreadsheets written by a coworker to automate some procedures. They have Visual Basic Macro's for some of the processes.
    I'd like to be able to open these with OpenOffice and have them function in the same way as with Excel. But I don't want to devote the time to learning how to rewrite the macros.
    SRR

  3. Re:Microsoft as a machine. by raddan · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I don't think that's it at all. I love OOo, but MSWord is, hands down, a better product (I work at a book publisher-- OOo is missing some important features). The problem is that you're tied in. Tie-in is Microsoft's M.O.

    Had Microsoft simply said that Office 2007 would fully support ODF, I'm willing to bet there would be a very good chance that Massachusetts would choose Office 2007 for the supported desktop configuration. Having working in IT for years (and two years in MA state IT), I can tell you that the familiar is the path of least resistance-- IT folks in MA are familiar with MS Office. But Microsoft doesn't really care about Massachusetts-- they want the world to get the idea that you can't convert an MSWord doc into an ODF one. The evidence from Sun about there being platform-specific features in the document format leads me to believe that Microsoft is doing everything in their power to tie the format to the platform.