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Public Request For Microsoft To Release Deprecated File Formats

Posted by Zonk on from the don't-hold-your-breath dept.

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situation to end up with files that cannot be read because the sole vendor with the documentation for the files has withdrawn permission.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."

3 of 154 comments (clear)

  1. Inaccurate summary by elrous0 · · Score: 5, Informative
    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.

    --
    SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
    1. Re:Inaccurate summary by Gadget_Guy · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

  2. They might not have it... by Pedrito · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.