Slashdot Mirror
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situation to end up with files that cannot be read because the sole vendor with the documentation for the files has withdrawn permission.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."
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.
If you do that, people will never learn and continue to use closed formats. It's too easy to fall for a closed format for your crucial documents and then go whining when the company stops supporting them. Let people pay the price of their mistake, then, then open document formats will pick up steam.
\u262D = \u5350
The reason - they don't have any documents describing the formats.
Code are descriptions of formats.
When Microsoft was forced to disclose information about the SMB format to EU anti-trust department they tried to give them the source code - complaining that it cost them too much to describe the format.
So they are sadly asking for something that dont exists.
Just saying it like it are.
Technically, it would be sufficient for the sake of old documents to provide a free tool that is able to read those documents, or a tool that would convert them to an open document format. This tool wouldn't need to have its source published.
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.
Is crushing a suspect's child's testicles illegal?
John Yoo: "No, [if] the President thinks he needs to do that."
Isn't it quite obvious that there are no specs? The OOXML specs are probably the best they can do when they have to reverse engineer the code into documentation. Don't expect any better than that and furthermore, don't expect them to even try (which they at least have when it comes to the OOXML documentation).
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.
I think that something people don't get is that there are not and never were comprehensive specifications for these formats. The specification is likely the code and nothing more. The document formats weren't conceived as a du jure standard, they are things that grew over time and evolved. Somewhere at the core you're going to find things like a C structs - from some old and forgotten compiler - being copied verbatim to disk.
Asking Microsoft for the spec will not mean simply taking an existing doc off the shelf and handing it over. It will mean either handing over the code for the old products that read and write those formats or spending person-years of effort combing through that code, constructing a specification, and then, somehow, testing the spec.
I wouldn't hold my breath for either.
As noted in another post about this article, it may be that there is no "format" other than "the code". If so, then the only free tool that is cheap to make is a wrapper around a complete application that just calls only part of that application. If so, making the wrapped tool free means giving away the entire program, not just the file part. In effect, then, this amounts to requesting that old versions be made free. Any difference between your proposal and asking old versions of their editor to just be made "free" (for whatever free you might be meaning) is just words, I suspect--nothing semantic.
Of course, this comes back to the question of whether there should be software patents at all, and whether software copyrights should have the immensely long durations that they do. Indeed, at some point, probably much shorter than happens now, having old tools be free so they can be recycled for other purposes may not be bad. It might even give vendors a kick in the pants to move faster to make newer tools be different enough that the old tools didn't threaten them. But bypassing a proper change in software copyright and patent law and instead just beating up on certain people who have things one wants does not seem the best approach to me.
Kent M Pitman
Philosopher, Technologist, Writer
It is rare that I agree with Slashdot articles on such things, but on this, even the most pro-Microsoft zealot cannot really disagree... everybody wins if these specs are released... They're no more supported, don't compete with Microsoft's newer formats, and would -heavily- show all the entities investigating Microsoft's monopoly that they can "do the right thing".
It would also be a superb PR move (even though they don't deserve the publicity for something they should have done on their own long ago): it would reassure clueless CEOs. "See?? We can use closed source software, because once Microsoft doesn't support it, they'll just open it up!!!". It is far from true, but enough would think that way to make it worth it.
So come on MS, do it.
It's not NEARLY as clean as Apple's Applescript solution, but since you can script OLE Components, you should be able to set up a computer to migrate the documents. If they are on a file server, you should be able to set up a machine with whatever is the last version of Office that can read the old files, and have it walk through your document tree, looking for each appropriate document. Then it should be able to load it in Office and save it in a newer format.
That would get all your documents in the latest (Office 2003 or something), then you adapt the script to run on a machine with Office 2007 and do the same thing. Presto-chango, your documents are up to date and safe.
Regarding formatting... if you're talking about documents not updated in 5-10 years, you probably don't care that much. You might want the content (I need to go through old hard drives and rescue any high school and college papers I care about, that are now hitting the 10 year old point), but if you haven't used it in years, and then want to use it, you can take the time to reformat. You're preserving because 1% of those documents might be needed in the future, which makes it worthwhile to bring them forward with an automated solution.
we want to move forward, to adopt a standard -give some time to deprecated formats by supporting them till some time (a deadline), and provide conversion tools for free.
Yes, we'd like to have a standard, and one which is readable for a long period of time - which is the point of the whole ODF standard in the first place. The problem with the proprietary formats is that they have every reason to change and a considerable number of reasons to drop support for "deprecated" formats.
I used to work for a medical transcription unit, and we generated over 250K documents annually. It is a non-trivial exercise to convert those documents from one format to another. That doesn't include the loss of formatting which occurs, and there are instances where the formatting is important. This loss occurs even when moving between versions of the same software - just take a Word 97 document and translate it to 2K and then to 2003, and you'll see it.
Your idea is feasible if it's a one-time function. That is, there is a standard format which will be used for a considerable length of time, and you need to translate your older documents into that standard. If you're going to have to do it ever two or three years, it's going to be a non-starter.
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. Emulation of the proper platform and installation of the appropriate software are all that's needed. The real trouble rests with obsolete physical storage media. I still have 5.25" floppies that I haven't been able to read for many years now, but that's hardly Microsoft's fault! And if there's a market for it, someone will be happy to copy all of your old media onto something more modern.
To the making of books there is no end, so let's get started
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?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Based on my previous successes in getting Microsoft to release the source code to the deprecated MS-DOS 4.x (i.e. before the MS-DOS 5.0 complete re-write) under a free / open-source license, I'm confident that Microsoft will be happy to release deprecated file formats under a similar license.
Oh, wait ...