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Microsoft Releases Office Binary Formats
Microsoft has released documentation on their Office binary formats. Before jumping up and down gleefully, those working on related open source efforts, such as OpenOffice, might want to take a very close look at Microsoft's Open Specification Promise to see if it seems to cover those working on GPL software; some believe it doesn't. stm2 points us to some good advice from Joel Spolsky to programmers tempted to dig into the spec and create an Excel competitor over a weekend that reads and writes these formats: find an easier way. Joel provides some workarounds that render it possible to make use of these binary files. "[A] normal programmer would conclude that Office's binary file formats: are deliberately obfuscated; are the product of a demented Borg mind; were created by insanely bad programmers; and are impossible to read or create correctly. You'd be wrong on all four counts."
I think this workaround is for companies and professionals with resources, not just zealots. Chances are if you are doing web applications that parse MS Office formats, you're intelligent enough to be running office on one of your servers, instead of pouring thousands of man hours into implementing something that you can give away to competitors through the GPL.
If you are an open source zealot, I recommend the following work-arounds:
* Complain that the code is somehow inferior
* Make a conspiracy theory about how Microsoft foresaw open source and were trying to stifle it
* Solve 40% of the problem and claim superiority
* Hack something unreadable together in perl and pretend that it's more interoperable- once more, claim superiority