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Office 2003 Bug Locks Owners Out
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "A Microsoft Office 2003 bug is locking people out of their own files, specifically those protected with Microsoft's Rights Management Service. Microsoft has a TechNet bulletin on the issue with a fix. It looks like they screwed up and let a certificate expire. There's no information on when the replacement certificate will expire, though, or what will happen when it does."
The cases where the user would be "hosed" are few to none.
This bug only applies to documents protected with Rights Management Services, which is part of Active Directory and the Windows Server operating system.
Therefore, the only way you would have an issue is if you were on a network that used RMS but had no internet connection, in which case you'd have your IT guy download a fix from some other internet-connected machine and deploy it to the systems with the bug.
This will not affect people who are simply running their own copies of Office 2003 without RMS or Active Directory or any other fancy add-ons.
It's still vendor lock in if there's no competing product that reads their open formats.
Umm... There are a huge number of programs that read/write ODF (OpenOffice's default format). Wikpedia has a fairly extensive list of software that handles the various ODF files.
This has nothing to do with open formats.
If you encrypt and digitally sign (aka DRM) your OO.org files, and loose the ability to decrypt them, you are in the same boat.
This is a story about DRM, not formats. A story about the forgotten idea of key escrow idea and of DRM cert servers, not file formats.
THL phish sticks
Eventually the bigwigs get tired of the fact that they cannot understand how to use save-as-older-format, and they dislike having their underlings telling them to do things, and they cannot bear to find all the files they saved and re-save them before they downgrade back to the old version... So the entire company naturally has to pay to upgrade everyone.
Or, the admins download and roll out the Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack and leave the CEO with his new shiny-shiny.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
I blame this kind of error messages on programmers who use exceptions. Instead of doing error checking within the routine that has the problem and crafting an error message in there, you just throw an exception, hoping for the caller to take care of it. If the caller doesn't then the exception keeps floating up until nobody has a clue to what the condition was, hence "unexpected error". I hate exceptions.
Non-Linux Penguins ?
And then the admins get to deal with documents that can't be handled by the converter. I had one last month, had to install 2007 to open it. I forgot to check Open Office first though. 2007 isn't as bad as the problems '97 caused, but it still causes some.
My parents are on OO.o, my girlfriend is on OO.o, and my NetBook is on OO.o. The universal response in this admittedly small sample has been: "hey, that looks a lot more like the Office I'm used to!".
That's a Windows PC, an iMac, and a Linux netbook by the way.
LyX is your friend. It's a wonderful WYSIWYM(ean) editor for LaTeX.