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situation to end up with files that cannot be read because the sole vendor with the documentation for the files has withdrawn permission.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

Re:Inaccurate summary

[faloi]

If you really feel that Microsoft stands to lose so much from releasing specs so that people can potentially even work on their most recent formats, then surely you can appreciate that Microsoft has some responsibility to its customers to make sure they can access their data. Most companies would likely be completely happy with a reader or proprietary file converter that would let them open up older documents. You know...like we could essentially always do when a new version of Office rolled around.

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.

Re:Microsoft cant do that

[adpsimpson]

Considering the code for rendering the older .doc formats is now officially considered 'unsafe' by Microsoft, and has been disabled in Office 2007, perhaps releasing the code itself (or choice chunks of it) would be just as useful?

Surely if you have a chunk of code for a no longer supported format, which you consider too buggy and unsafe, which is 10 years old and which you've disabled in your latest products, you wouldn't mind letting other people clean it up for free, since it can't be of any commercial value?

Right?

--ducks the '-1 flamebait' mod---