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Microsoft Releases Pre-2007 Binary File Format Specs
An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft has released the specifications for the binary file formats used by pre-2007 Microsoft Office applications. They're accurate this time! Honest! While the documents are enormous (Word alone requires 533 pages; Excel runs over 1000 plus another 850 pages for the Office 2007 binary format), they hopefully will be useful to developers trying to create or extract information from Microsoft Office files (which despite their flaws, have been the de facto standard in many fields for some time now)."
Isn't this old news? I mean, it's been covered on Slashdot at least twice now. (Dear timothy, I'd like to introduce you to my friend Google.)
Yes, the formats are large and complicated, but for a variety of good, if antiquated, reasons. I'd suggest anyone interested read Joel Spolsky's blog post on it (which, being posted last February, isn't news either but hey, this is Slashdot).
"What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
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Check out the patent maps here
--10scjed IANAL,AFAIK
From here -> You or anyone else has nothing to worry about. Microsoft has changed its tune.:
Microsoft irrevocably promises not to assert any Microsoft Necessary Claims against you for making, using, selling, offering for sale, importing or distributing any implementation to the extent it conforms to a Covered Specification (âoeCovered Implementationâ), subject to the following. This is a personal promise directly from Microsoft to you, and you acknowledge as a condition of benefiting from it that no Microsoft rights are received from suppliers, distributors, or otherwise in connection with this promise. If you file, maintain or voluntarily participate in a patent infringement lawsuit against a Microsoft implementation of such Covered Specification, then this personal promise does not apply with respect to any Covered Implementation of the same Covered Specification made or used by you. To clarify, âoeMicrosoft Necessary Claimsâ are those claims of Microsoft-owned or Microsoft-controlled patents that are necessary to implement only the required portions of the Covered Specification that are described in detail and not merely referenced in such Specification. âoeCovered Specificationsâ are listed below.
Read this article:
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/02/19.html
Summarizing how Office file formats were made super complex without anybody necessarily doing anything wrong, or anybody writing bad code.
Comment of the year
This means, as far as I know, that GPL implementations are not allowed. So it's an even worse situation than before, because Free Software developers can't even look at this documentation to verify any of the conclusions of their reverse engineering.
Really, Microsoft has no chance of pleasing you, do they? Just accept that it's good for everyone to have open standards, regardless of the possible ulterior motives involved.
The point is that MS's patent licenses (and therefore their specs), due to the non-commerce clause, are not GPL compatible. See, MS is not threatened by a BSD license, because if a BSD product takes off, they can just embrace, extend, extinguish. They're really worried about GPL though, because any GPL project that succeeds is a true competitive threat.
In short, I don't think they've opened the specs. Documented them, yes, published them, sure, but they have NOT opened them.
This isn't new. MS posted an earlier revision on February 20 this year. Today's announcement is mostly about the fact that it's out of "beta".
Actually the non-commercial clause is incompatible with the BSD license as well.