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)."

Comments

Coincidence?

[ah42]

And to think, this happens the day after Gates steps down...

Re:Kudos to them

[Enderandrew]

Non-commercial projects can implement them. Commercial projects can not. So Lotus Symphony and Sun Office can't use these specs. OpenOffice and KOffice can.

That beats the situation yesterday.

They are more open today than they were.

Re:No we don't

[Enderandrew]

If you don't distribute OpenOffice or KOffice commercially that is fine. They aren't distributed commercially. Lotus Symphony and Star Office are.

So OOo and KOffice can use these specs.

Re:Kudos to them

[Enderandrew]

I'll repeat this for like the 5th time.

You don't have to pay royalties. You are free to read the specs without paying royalties. You are free to integrate the information from those specs in third-party software so long as it is non-commercial.

OpenOffice is non-commercial. KOffice is non-commercial. IBM would have to pay to license the patents if they wanted to include that information in their commercial Lotus Symphony suite.

I'm also curious about Novell in this situation. They have a patent agreement. Is this going to be thrown in? And is the project commercial if the software itself is free (as in beer) but people charge for support?