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Microsoft Releases Specs for Binary Formats
skolima writes "In response to requests for even easier access to the Binary Formats, Microsoft has agreed to remove any intermediate steps necessary to get the documentation. They're going to just post it, making it directly available as a download on the Microsoft web site. Microsoft will also make the Binary Formats subject to its Open Specification Promise by February 15, 2008. They're even planning to include an Open Source converter implementation."
Yes, I'm they will!
Satan: Why did it just get so cold in here?
I hope these intermediate steps that they're eliminating include packaging the documents in an .exe file, and requiring MS Office to be installed. I'm looking at you, Word format!
--Rob
Towards the Singularity.
And they will even an Open Source converter implementation
i find myself doing this all the time at work now, and it's embarrassing. I leave entire words out of emails, IMs, etc. I never used to do that. I must be getting old.
Many times, I'll leave out a negating word, like "not", causing me to communicate the wrong idea.
This has to be good. Right ? How will this work with specifications that say "render text like Word 98?" Will Microsoft now document how Word 98 renders ?
thats the carrot then. so where's the stick?
Wow! It sounds like Microsoft has seen the light! It's only a matter of time now before they start giving away all their software for free.
Because it ensures that the very real possibility of bitrot for the majority of documents written in the last 15 years is now greatly reduced.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Wait, what? Brain not comprehending this. Unless TFA is a complete pack of lies, I'm going to have to give tentative applause. Perhaps the only interesting thing I can think of is that "royalty free" != "we won't sue you into oblivion if we think you're trespassing on our patents". Sorry MS, you taught me to be cynical.
Moderation Total: -1 Troll, +3 Goat
Disclaimer:IANAL
The docs are released under MS' own "Open Specification Promise" *cringes*
http://www.microsoft.com/interop/osp/default.mspx
If you do a search on GPL you get:
Q: Is this Promise consistent with open source licensing, namely the GPL? And can anyone implement the specification(s) without any concerns about Microsoft patents?
A: The Open Specification Promise is a simple and clear way to assure that the broadest audience of developers and customers working with commercial or open source software can implement the covered specification(s). We leave it to those implementing these technologies to understand the legal environments in which they operate. This includes people operating in a GPL environment. Because the General Public License (GPL) is not universally interpreted the same way by everyone, we can't give anyone a legal opinion about how our language relates to the GPL or other OSS licenses, but based on feedback from the open source community we believe that a broad audience of developers can implement the specification(s).
I don't get warm and fuzzy feelings reading this and I think that's the idea...
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
...and since this is slashdot, it's not good enough until they've also:
1. refunded all money earned through use of these formats
2. allow people to fork them and then demand that their idiot-forks get recombined into the trunk and incorporated into MS Office 09
3. #2 isn't good enough, Microsoft must even make sure that they are in the next release of OO even though they have nothing to do with that product
4. Clipart of Steve Ballmer throwing chairs is included
5. it is released under the GPLv3 license
6. the EU gets to fine them another trillion euros (with a lower-case e) for every day since 1980 that the formats have not been open
7. none of the above points matter because Microsoft sucks anyway and no one @ slashdot uses MS Office, they all use OO (yea, right!)
so go ahead, mod me down you fuckers.
Microsoft patents ones and zeros
Note that these specs have been available previously, royalty free, just by e-mailing MS (or so they claim), meaning that anybody who wanted them has got them, or can get them.
The only interesting thing here is the converter they're proposing, assuming nobody beats them to it with a better one.
Even plain ini/text/xml etc. is eventually stored as ones and zeros. And I think I saw a 2...
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
Microsoft is releasing the specs for binary document formats. This will help those who want to support and maintain those formats so this is a gift from Microsoft. Fellow residents of Troy, let us be grateful and embrace this great offering.
or there's no way they'd be doing this. Well, it is Microsoft so there are likely to be some problems. For instance, they could post 10,000 lines of assembly or just plain crappy C code and say, 'there you go, it's open'. Not so bad in itself but not very easy to use none the less.
But what is really probably happening here is that ODF is getting adopted around the world by governments and once you go ODF, it's going to be a tough sell back to the pull-the-rug-out-from-under-your-feet Microsoft way. Anyways, if Microsoft really sees ODF as a credible threat, getting MS Office OXML through ISO is important, very important. But, once they can do that and gain back credibility, there is NOTHING to stop them from releasing software which others are not privy too. ie, change the format and keep everyone else chasing them.
Remember, ISO will not be in control of the changes to the spec, Microsoft will be.
So watch out for this good-guy mask being applied. We've seen nothing to say there isn't anything but the same old Microsoft hiding behind it. And no, I would not accept this as a first step and something to trust. ODF and open access to your own created data is too important to let a simple trick undermine it all. IMO.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
Don't worry, there's no such thing as 2.
Try opening a word file in the plain text editor of your choice. There's actually a lot of plain text in there, it seems the binary is mostly from formatting (and embedded binary objects - like images).
I've had an occasion or two where a word document got corrupted and office wouldn't fix it. Out of curiosity, I opened it in notepad. I cut out all the formatting bytes, and cleaned up some areas where spaces were added between characters in a section of text (WTF?), and saved the plain text. Nothing of my document was missing (since I didn't have pictures in it or anything like that).
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
Wait a second, does this include Exchange? If so, that's huge.
As covered in this link, it appears that most of these specifications have either been removed or documented. What this does mean is that perhaps it will be possible to truly understand what these formatting hooks refer to, not what MS have documented them as referring to...
(Thanks to zmotula for the link)
Is crushing a suspect's child's testicles illegal?
John Yoo: "No, [if] the President thinks he needs to do that."
positive for Microsoft, negative for those who want to own the rights to view the contents of their data. FYI, there's 20 years of history to show that what Microsoft giveth, Microsoft taketh away. Remember, they once said that ISO will control changes to the MS Office OXML spec if standardized but in the past couple of months, changed that and said they would control changes to the spec. There is no way in hell Microsoft is not going to use this to keep changing the format and keep all others behind them in implementation of these changes. 20 years showing this is the way they work.
positive for Microsoft, negative for everyone else. After all, MS Office OXML was created for the purpose of fighting off the acceptance of the ODF format so every move they make with MS OOXML is to stop acceptance of ODF. And the fact that Microsoft would not work with the hundreds of OASIS members in creation of the ODF spec is another example of the 20 year old Microsoft tactic of 'it is our spec and your spec can rot in hell' mentality. They have never accepted or worked with any truly open spec without corrupting it on their platform. IMO.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
... Lucifer has announced the launch of a massive advertisement campaign to promote the opening of his new snow park under the brand "Hell Inc."
They must be worried sick about the ISO meeting in February, scheduled for a week after this grand opening. It's make or break time for MS-OOXML.
Meaning there won't be enough time to fully investigate whether these specs are actually useful or just PR BS like every other "Open" thing MS has done. Forgive me for preemptively assuming the latter.
The enemies of Democracy are
From wiki: a representation for numbers using only two digits (usually, 0 and 1) Nex week Microsoft will release specs for Octal format We're expecting full disclosure for Hexadecimal to follow soon.
"This has to be good. Right ?
/windows/system/explorer.dll /windows/system/kernel.dll
How will this work with specifications that say "render text like Word 98?" Will Microsoft now document how Word 98 renders ?"
I'm sure there'll be some nice documents to tell you exactly how each of these statements work. You know, things like:
1)open file
2)scan for 0x06660666
3)take the next 128 bytes and pass them to winRulesAll(*DWORD) in
4)take the resulting array of 8bit vectors and sequentially call winConvertToBlob[0-255](LoByte(DWORD)) in
5)concatenate the results from those calls and send to sysDecryptWord95Text(URL,*DWORD) in mplayer.dll with URL=http://microsoft.com/secretdoor.asp
6)replace those 128 bytes with the results from the call or, if failed, render text like Word 95.
Easy as pie.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
Are you sure those aren't chairs?
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
What the hell is all this crap about "open and level playing field"?!? Are you kidding me?
Look, we can idealize society all we want, but putting on blinders and not seeing reality is just foolish.
If you come up in a fight against Tito Ortiz, you sure as hell want a baseball bat. You might call that leveling the playing field, but that's only the case because Tito has an advantage in the first place. *HE* doesn't want to give up his strength, size and experience to your baseball bat just because you want a fair fight. Only the guy with the up-hill battle wants the fair fight!
The underdogs always cry foul and always want someone, some government agency, some legal entity, to come to their aid and "level the playing field". Hogwash I say. The guy that has the advantage, at some point, did something right (right in the sense that it got them an advantage) that the underdog didn't do. They deserve their status as favorite because they worked for it.
The underdog can still get an advantage any time they want, with the right effort. Microsoft doesn't hold the equivalent of a doomsday bomb. They CAN be beat. Yes, it's harder now. They've made it EXTREMELY difficult to compete against them, and certainly they've done so at times in ways that are morally objectionable. I wish the world was such where we could count on everyone to act reasonably and morally, in which case wanting a level playing field might be reasonable, but that's not the reality.
Besides, when has the human race as a whole ever shied away from a challenge because it was "too hard"? We've been to the moon for crying out loud! Are you telling me someone can't figure out a way, level playing field or not, to beat Microsoft? Hey, *I* don't know how to do it, but there's plenty of people smarter than me that have got to be able to figure it out.
So let's stop whining all the damned time, let's stop idealizing things and bitching about how there should be a level, fair playing field. NO THERE SHOULD NOT. Those that out-work the rest should have the advantages they've earned, and those that haven't achieved that should just tighten their belts and man the fuck up and get it done, overcome the odds (which they made longer by being out-hustled in the first place).
If you're David, you're not going to beat Goliath by bitching and moaning about your pitiful slingshot and how someone should "make it fair" and give you a bazooka, you need to figure out how to build an F-16 yourself and get things done. All the complaining in the world isn't going to make that happen.
Is it just me, or does this story remind anyone of The Onion headline, "Microsoft patents ones and zeros"
The only Notepad specific "file type" is a .LOG text file, where the ASCII '.', 'L', 'O', 'G' is the file magic in the first four characters (might require after, I forget). It appends the date and time whenever you open the file. It's still "ANSI" format, but it does special stuff if it is there.
It was plenty enough time to know those documents are inadequate. If they aren't giving out any new information, then this is, in fact, just PR fluff.
The enemies of Democracy are
After signed drivers comes signed applications. What good will any of this do if you can't run the app without microsoft's blessing?
That's so blatantly anti-competitive that I don't think even MS would be daft enough to try it - yes, they'd like to but they know that this time the EU would get medieval on their ass. Literally hundreds of companies (compared with a handful in the past) would be lodging EU competition complaints, and although MS could drag things out for a few years they'd end up with many more restrictions on their behaviour than they have now. Plus MS is hardly going to suddenly stop people writing applications using MS's own development tools unless they get each app signed. That would undermine the entire 'Windows ecosystem' that is so essential to their profit and market control.
I think they've got enough cunning to at least be a bit more subtle (e.g. exend the 'signed driver only' model by introducing new class of signed 'system' apps and preventing unsigned apps from using certain 'low-level' features. Eventually the only apps you could write/run unsigned would be of a limited sandboxed type.)