Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Microsoft Releases Pre-2007 Binary File Format Specs

Posted by timothy on from the in-exchange-they-can-read-the-odf-spec dept.

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)."

7 of 269 comments (clear)

  1. Re:How freaking "open" of them... by 10scjed · · Score: 5, Informative
    Not that Open...

    Some of the Microsoft protocols include patented inventions, and others do not. You may benefit from a patent license if you are distributing implementations of these protocols commercially or if you use an implementation of any of the protocols covered by Microsoft patents. For more information, contact the Microsoft Open Protocols Team.

    Check out the patent maps here

    --
    --10scjed IANAL,AFAIK
  2. Re:How freaking "open" of them... by KokorHekkus · · Score: 5, Informative
    To be fair, the article also adds:

    It is important to note that open source developers, whether commercial or non-commercial, will not need a patent license for the development of implementations of these protocols or for the non-commercial distribution of these implementations, according to Microsoft's Patent Pledge for Open Source Developers.

  3. Re:Honest Attempt by Blakey+Rat · · Score: 4, Informative

    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
  4. Has no one noticed that they're covered by "OSP"? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  5. Re:How freaking "open" of them... by jsebrech · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  6. Re:interesting... by jkabbe · · Score: 4, Informative

    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".

  7. Re:By following the links.... by temcat · · Score: 5, Informative

    This has been dissected and shown to promise nothing - because it's impossible to clearly see what exactly the "necessary claims" are, and because useful implementation of the spec without the "merely referenced" stuff may be impossible.