Public Request For Microsoft To Release Deprecated File Formats

SgtChaireBourne writes "NLnet, a Dutch foundation for an open information society, has publicly called for Microsoft to release its deprecated formats into the public domain. The maker of Office has made large efforts during the last year to move against the OpenDocument Format (ISO/IEC 26300). These efforts have been producing a lot of commentary regarding the amount of data bound up in the Redmond-based company's proprietary specifications. It's a nasty situation to end up with files that cannot be read because the sole vendor with the documentation for the files has withdrawn permission. ODF is the way forward, or a step forward at the least, with new documents. But for the old documents in the legacy formats, they cannot be read without supporting software and that support requires full access to the specifications."

Comments

Inaccurate summary

[elrous0]

This call is not just to release OLDER file formats. That's the pretense, but if you read it carefully, you'll see sentences like this in the press release:

releasing the full blueprints of the many different versions of Microsoft's old Office formats (better known as doc, xls and ppt)

Last time I checked "many different versions" of doc, xls, and ppt are NOT old, obsolete file formats. They're essentially asking MS to not only open up their old file formats (such as Word 97 and older doc files), they're also asking them to hand over the full specifications on all their EXISTING modern formats--a move that would allow comptetitors to develop Office clones at will.

This is a thinly disquised shot at MS and closed source formats, not some noble attempt to help out archives. If it wasn't, they would have limited this to older files only and also called on other companies that make other older, proprietary formats (like Corel, Adobe, etc.) to release all their specs too.

Re:Inaccurate summary

[Gadget_Guy]

All it would take is for Microsoft to release a fully compatible viewer/converter so that everybody can open the oldest of documents, and companies would likely cease to care.

But they have done this for years, and yet everybody still complains.

Re:Inaccurate summary

[jamar0303]

It only goes to 97. There ARE versions of Word and Excel before that. I remember using Word 4.0 for Mac in elementary school to write stuff and still have the disks full of stuff I wrote back then. If not for my old SE/30 with Word 4.0 I wouldn't be able to open those documents anymore.

Re:Inaccurate summary

[QuietLagoon]

MS is a for-profit company. It is not their job to serve you, answer to you, provide you with public service, or unzip their flies and hand you all their trade secrets

Microsoft is a company that has been found guilty of the illegal leveraging of its monopoly. As such, a different set of laws apply to the sharing of Microsoft's intellectual property. We have already seen that Microsoft can be forced to share its protocols with competitors.

Re:Inaccurate summary

[Anonymous Coward]

neutral formats like rtf

rtf is neutral? Lots of comments seem to disagree with you. ^_^

Opening up OOXML

[adpsimpson]

The worst proprietary 'hooks' such as 'footnoteLayoutLikeWW8', 'lineWrapLikeWord6' and 'useWord97LineBreakRules', appear now to have been documented - see this link. This in effect means that some of the quirkier behaviour of old versions of MS Office may now have been made public (difficult to say for sure as the ECMA resolution is behind a passworded site).

Microsoft would make their, and everyone else's, lives a lot easier if they went the whole way and documented the entire depreciated office formats, allowing others to write filters to correctly interpret them. This would also give them a foothold in claiming that the tags above truly do point to an open format, since the behaviours they refer to would be openly documented.

But let's not hold our breath.

They might not have it...

[Pedrito]

Microsoft may not have the formats formally specified anywhere...Many, many years ago, shortly before my book was published, Microsoft actually wanted to hire me to write the official documentation for the Segmented Hyper-Graphic (SHG) file format because their own in-house documentation for the format was for an even older, unsupported version.

I mean, think about it, if you write code to store a document, do you sit down and write the byte-layout of that file? I suppose you could, but it's generally not necessary for the coders. My guess is that MS doesn't even have this stuff lying around. They'd probably have to have someone actually piece it together from the code.

Re:Microsoft cant do that

[dominator]

The reason - they don't have any documents describing the formats.

Except, they do. They've released specs for at least Word97, RTF, and PowerPoint's file formats, the OLE container format, and the Excel chart format. The docs were hosted on MSDN for a few years, even. I'm not saying that these docs are perfect or anything (they're far from it), but they're a decent start. I say this as someone who has used the docs to implement popular F/OSS tools that read and write these formats.

http://www.wotsit.org/list.asp?fc=10
http://www.wotsit.org/list.asp?fc=6

Re:A Little Overblown-NOT NECESSAIRLY

[Nom du Keyboard]

I'm beginning to think that a lot of the worry over old file formats becoming inaccessible in the future is overblown. With the continuing advances of emulation and virtualization technology, it seems highly unlikely that we'll lose all access to documents in old file formats.

Cannot agree with you here. Obviously you feel you can continue running Windows 98SE with Office 97 in a virtual partition essentially forever - and in that case, you probably can.

However, the moment you get to Windows XP and recent versions of Office, you hit the dreaded Product Activation bugaboo. Now you're dependent on MS, Adobe, or whomever to continue supporting activation servers as you migrate old software and operating systems to newer virtual platforms. Also EULA's that prevent using software in virtual environments exist. You may well find that running Office 2003 on Windows XP can't be done, legally at least, on the machine that follows your next one. Then where are you?