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MS Issues Word Patch To Comply With Court Order
bennyboy64 writes "iTnews reports that Microsoft has begun offering what appears to be a patch for its popular Word software, allowing it to comply with a recent court ruling which has banned the software giant from selling patent-infringing versions of the word processing product. The workaround should put an end to a long-running dispute between Canadian i4i and Redmond, although it has hinted that the legal battle might yet take another turn."
This is a civil lawsuit. The point is to make the plaintiff whole and cause the infringement to cease. It is not about any sort of punishment.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Because OO isn't compatible enough. If it doesn't look 100% the same, and I mean 100%, it's not good enough.
Don't submit something if you can't tell the difference between patent and copyright.
Hey don't blame me, IANAB
Groklaw has it.
It's very hard not to agree with the court that Microsoft wilfully infringed. Furthermore, it seems they expected to be caught, and to lose the inevitable suit - and didn't care either. Not hard to see why: The damages awarded are equivalent to just two days' revenue for Microsoft (although they infringed for five years). As a commenter pointed out, that's why such cases are unlikely to change their posture on software patents; even when they lose in that arena (and they are serial infringers, frequently losing such cases) - they have already made a huge profit on the whole dirty business. Same old Microsoft.
The way damages were calculated is detailed by the document linked (and was upheld by appeal, as it most likely substantially underestimated the real damages).
you had me at #!
That's utopian thinking. For home use, I more or less agree with you. Business users have a lot of finely detailed and rigidly laid out documents, sometimes with proprietary macro or VBA coding in them. This stuff would be a huge pain to translate to an open standard, and there's no guarantee that OOo will display them faithfully and with fidelity.
Plus, with a MS Office contract, you have a software vendor to fall back to when things go wrong. You don't get this to the same extent with OSS, which is why business is often slow to adopt it.
Existing copies of Word were expressly grandfathered in by the ruling -- only the sale of new copies was prohibited. Is the patch intended to be applied against shrink-wrapped copies bought after Jan. 11th?
CENTER FOR UNEASE CONTROL, Seattle, -- A federal court has banned Microsoft Word from sale as a poisonous substance, suspected of causing millions of brain-deaths around the world.
Microsoft Office has long been considered potentially hazardous to health, despite advertising claiming that "four out of five CEOs prefer Outlook" and most of the billions of dollars sloshing around in major banks' credit-default swaps before the Great Recession actually having been calculated in macros in Excel.
Workers whose computers are infected with Microsoft Office are advised to press "escape," step slowly away from the desk, break into a run and gather at the official hazardous substances meeting point, in the pub around the corner from the office.
Symptoms include nausea, irritability and short temper, hostility, homicidal impulses, loss of mental clarity, diarrhoea, mental confusion and liver damage from excess alcohol consumption.
Doctors have recommended victims of Word use OpenOffice instead, its "majestic" startup time giving one healthy pause to catch one's breath, make a cup of tea and nip off to the loo, and its fibrous composition providing the same health-giving effects and taste sensation as eating a bowl of sawdust with milk every morning for the rest of your life. Many sufferers have instead opted to write on toilet paper with a burnt stick.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
Hooray! Now we can all stagnate. See: Melancholy Elephants but instead of standard writing, apply it to programming writing. From a comment in: This Story (which I'm in too ;): "To protect all artists you must disadvantage some. Those some rarely see the logic." which leads to: "Its a horrible future where the copyright maximalist dream (copyright forever and ever) is near at hand, and is finally shown to be a nightmare. The "some" artists that are disadvantaged are the ones who cannot profit from their works in a reasonable time period and refuse to cope with the markets. The Vast Majority who are protected are the Other artists of today and the infinite future, protecting their freedom to innovate, rebuild and even reinvent without some ancient monopoly power looming in the shadows to spank them and call them thieves." Software patents are basically "copyright" for ideas so all of this applies. Now, I'm not saying software patents shouldn't exist but rather in the context of stagnation especially with the pace of development that they should be much shorter than they are now.
Shh.
This isn't totally honest.
The transition from Office 97 to Office 2000 caused major headaches because of the lack of proper support for .doc format. People got thru that by recreating many documents, or just doing without them, or waiting until a service pack came out many months later.
Ditto with the transition from Office 2003 to 2007. I've dealt with numerous cases, especially with Powerpoint, where opening and saving in Office 2007 totally fucked up a document. Stuff disappeared, or was rearranged. One case, where the boss got a new laptop 2 days before a conference. His old one died and his new one came with Office 2007. He edited his presentation, saved it as an Office 2003 .ppt and sent it to his assistant to finish. It was totally fubar, but she only edited a few slides in the beginning and didn't see the mess later on. When she sent it to him, her edits looked like crap to him and his earlier edits were gone. It was a nightmare that saw the assistant recreate the entire thing from a printout the day before the conference -- and a total office ban on Office 2007 the day after.
Shit happens, even when exclusively in the MS world. People would redo the documents that didn't translate properly. They'd bitch, but they'd do it. I've seen it time and time again over the last 20+ years. Wordstar (dot commands FTW!) to Wordperfect to Word; Lotus 1-2-3 to Excel; god-knows-what to Visio; and don't even get me started on CAD!
And SuSE, Red Hat, TRW or IBM would be happy to take your money for a support contract.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
YOU HAVEN'T HEARD THE LAST OF MEEeeeeeeee!!!!!!!!!!!
* /steve shakes fist angrily.
A lot of OSS projects don't sell support contracts; you might be able to hire a key contributor to an OSS project on some kind of consulting basis, but they aren't really on call for support.
There may be third parties good at implementing and possibly troubleshooting some OSS software or components, but if you need some fix implemented due to a bug you're back to being at mercy of the OSS developers unless your third party has developers on staff who can fix OSS products.
None of this is to say the existing commercial market is perfect -- its not, we know that -- but it is a mature market and my experience has been that a lot of commercial applications, including MS, have pretty decent support available when you need it.
Open office's word processor isn't bad. I've been forced to use the powerpoint replacement (called "Impress") recently and the word "SUCK" doesn't even begin to cover just how badly unworkable it is. In fact, I've renamed it "Repress" because that's a more accurate description of what it does.
I'm not trying to do fancy transitions or stupid animations either. Just basic slideware for hour or 90 minute long technical presentations. It can't even do a fsking "replace template" or "master" properly. It just sucks. Totally and completely sucks.
By the way, in case I wasn't clear -- I don't care for it.
When it meets even close to parity, I'll jump all over it. Until then, I'll pay my Microsoft tax (or switch and pay my Apple tax).
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
Then why does every new version of Microsoft Office look 100% different than the previous version?
Semi-OT, but a handy way to use different versions of Office on the same PC, and portably on a USB key, is to modify their installation via VMWare ThinApp:
http://www.vmware.com/products/thinapp/
I found out about Thinstals/Thinapps/"portable" versions when I accidentally browsed a torrent site where they are popular for various reasons, but the concept works well and it's easier to copy/paste a folder than do a conventional install.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
I do exactly that with business documents every day. I open them in OpenOffice.org, print them from OO.o, and if something doesn't import/open correctly due to mistranslation, I make do with what I've got just like millions of users have done across decades of opening important documents in various versions of Microsoft office programs. Microsoft's office programs don't always open and work flawlessly across operating systems or even versions of Microsoft Office. Any talk about "guarantees" and 100% perfect conversion, that's the utopia.
Digital Citizen
I should have clarified; what I meant was that if the document doesn't look and behave exactly the same when opened in OO (including macros, VBA etc etc which are in use everyday at every corporation) then it's not an option.
There is even _less_ guarantee that MS format documents will be correctly displayed or formatted by _any_ tool. Microsoft has repeatedly been shown, in court, to publish documentation of their formats so bad that it is useless to other developers. And the changes between MS Word versions are frequently terribly mishandled by even the best of Microsoft's tools.
In general, the few documents that do not display correctly in OpenOffice which I've not encountered were prey to time-wasting layout micromanagers, who specified every single character's position for esthetic effects that have nothing to do with actual content, and the mishandling is a good indicator that the document itself is written by a paper-work pusher collecting their management salary for picking fonts.
And have you ever _tried_ to get MS Office support, as opposed to commercial OpenOffice support or even open source support for OpenOffice? Go ahead: try to get help with Hebrew printing, or Microsoft mishandling of Unicode.
So angry.
Have you ever had a support contract before? At the university where I'm the backup software license officer, we've got a Microsoft Campus Agreement, as well as software site license for SPSS, and multiple other statistical and mathematical software packages. If a widespread problem occurs due to a software fault, such as the calendar issues we were having on the 2003-2007 Office switch, they had someone on the problem and the problem resolved in less than a day.
When a similar glitch occurred in our Evolution users, we had to submit a bug report, then wait for a new version to be released to repository, as we couldn't expect our users to compile from CVS, as the majority of them don't even have a build toolkit.
There's anecdotal evidence for both sides of the argument, but I stand by what's been said.
Oof!:
http://store.vmware.com/store/vmware/en_US/DisplayProductDetailsPage/productID.105855000
Not a big deal for lots of groups, but a show stopper for lots of others.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Business users have a lot of finely detailed and rigidly laid out documents
And then they use Word... of all programs... to do that?
That’s like drawing pictures in MS Paint. ^^
For that task, the area is not “word processing”, but “DTP”.
InDesign, QuarkXPress, Scribus and (La)TeX would be the tools for that.
The “quality” of layout that you can do in MS programs, you can do in OOo too.
There is no guarantee that MS documents look right in OOo, true. But on top of there also being no guarantee that MS documents will display right in other versions from MS, there is a guarantee that open documents will not display right in MS at all.
For sending around documents, with a guaranteed layout, you use PDF anyway. Anything else would look ridicoulous and pointy-haired.*
Plus, with a MS Office contract, you have a software vendor to fall back to when things go wrong. You don't get this to the same extent with OSS, which is why business is often slow to adopt it.
Stop spreading that lie. There are many companies out there who gladly sell you professional support. :)
I wonder if MS will ever change the application and add new code for you... Because they can, and you can afford it too.
* Yes, I laughed at my ex-boss for sending me stuff in MS formats. Then I founded my own company, telling them I’d come back when I could buy them for some peanuts. Now they were sold for a single peanut. I was there. I laughed. ^^
In the end you control your own value, what you accept, and what not.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
That's not worth the electrons you used to type that sentence. Through work, I have had a "platinum" trouble ticket open with these idiots for about 6 years now. It's a pretty serious issue - documents that become corrupted either while they are being edited, or when opened and then closed. Not trivial stuff - characters just change from one thing to another. They haven't even made a decent effort to resolve it. Their solution to document corruption is to get a correct printed copy, somehow, then scan it in as a TIFF file. This from a senior tech at MS. Not only that, they have consistently been unable to get a simple NDA signed and ITAR certification so that I can give them some of the examples. The sticking point is that they seemingly can't ensure that all the people working it are US citizens. That's not asking a lot for the kind of money that my very large aerospace company pays them in support costs, for this serious an issue.
Brett
Outlook, group policy, VBA macros, Active Directory deployment, Sharepoint integration, widespread compatibility with third party software.
I'm not a Microsoft troll. But you asked and that is the answer.
-Graham
Business users have a lot of finely detailed and rigidly laid out documents, sometimes with proprietary macro or VBA coding in them. This stuff would be a huge pain to translate to an open standard, and there's no guarantee that OOo will display them faithfully and with fidelity.
I take it you haven't tried to upgrade to the most recent version. Good luck with that proprietary macro support and having things not lose fidelity and work the same.
You don't get this to the same extent with OSS, which is why business is often slow to adopt it.
The majority of what prevents adoption of OO is FUD, plain & simple. Software vendor contract with MS Office? Are you kidding? Most businesses don't HAVE a vendor contract they just have a pack of licenses, and any issues with it working your "support" is to report a bug on their forums.
People are afraid to move to something new, and they've "heard" of issues with other products. Sure, I agree that OOo isn't totally acceptable for many companies, but many companies simply have themselves locked into a proprietary solution and are going to have issues no matter WHAT they try to migrate to. The better long-term approach is to free your company from such things, but managers rarely are able to "justify" real (or imaginary) migration issues.
I've used the markup feature in OpenOffice Writer several times (I moonlight as a technical writer sometimes and I have to deal with documents that have inline corrections originating in Word) and it passes muster. The color coding does not always work right (I sometimes set it, send the document to the client, and then have to reset it when I get it back) but the record of who made each edit is still intact even after several revisions, so it is no big deal. Granted, there's room for improvement, but the feature generally works as of OO.o v3. It used to be terrible in previous versions, so what is there is already a huge improvement.
"It is a denial of justice not to stretch out a helping hand to the fallen; that is the common right of humanity."
We have a very unique structure at the university. Our clients are our 4000+ staff, faculty and students, all of whom have standalone laptop systems, not part of our managed systems. We are currently looking into putting our own ubuntu repository online for custom packages and updated revisions, but the headaches of this breaking mainline repository updates is daunting.
The bulk of the systems (again, 4000+ laptops) never pass through our hands, so we can't configure them ourselves, and would have to provide documentation on this to the masses, 80% of whom would have no issues, and 20% of whom we'd end up having to handhold through the process of adding custom respositories, 5% of whom we'd have to see in person.
We have a not insignificant amount of users, primarily library staff and long time faculty who are on the far side of 60 years old, and are resentful and afraid of the picture box with the typewriter.
All in all, not insurmountable, just daunting, and it will be tackled some day, but the 2008-2009 school year marked the first year of official adoption by the faculty of OSS packages. We're still hammering out the wrinkles.
And no, my official title is "Technology Services Consultant", but I act as backup to the software license officer when he is otherwise indisposed.
Because OO isn't compatible enough. If it doesn't look 100% the same, and I mean 100%, it's not good enough.
It's not that it isn't 100% the same. Its that OO tried so hard to make a clone of MS Office and only got it about 80% the same. If you're going to be a blatant rip-off of an existing product, at least try to implement the same features in the same manner. Nothing like having almost identical menus, except the shortcut keys are slightly different.
MS Office skills are marketable at any age.
What exactly are MS Office skills?
Typing, and bold.
"Advanced skills" include italics and
"Go to CNN [for a] spell-checked, fact-checked summary" -- CmdrTaco
Your wording will probably get you a Troll mod but Impress is certainly weak compared to Powerpoint. May I suggest, however, that you try Latex + Beamer. It will construct very readable, elegant presentations quickly and without any "tax" at all (it's open source of course).
So if this is the future...where's my jet pack?
Users with a support contract (read: volume license) are under no obligation to use the most current version, and can in fact install any previous versions.
As Windows 2000 has not yet fallen out of support, our Windows Server 2008 R2 licenses may be used to acquire and install Windows 2000. I don't know if we can get Office 2000 still, but definitely 2003.
APP-V for Windows does the same thing at, I want to say $20/client/year. Virtualizes apps, lets you manage them from group policy, etc.
The number one problem I used to have was in style codes with built-in numbers, which is a very useful thing for the documents I write. They used to get f*cked from time to time, with the font of the number ending up different from the rest of the line. Then, one day, I had the same problem with a document that had never seen OO. The problem seems to be an inconsistency in MS Word over how it stores style codes internally.
Now, I just leave the number out of the codes til the end, and no problems converting anything.
The subject who is truly loyal to the Chief Magistrate will neither advise nor submit to arbitrary measures (Junius)
That's a pretty broad statement. Would you be a little more specific please?
OOo presentation works fine for me, and imports Powerpoint presentations at least as well as different versions of Office do.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
Then why do documents opened in every new version of Microsoft Office look different than in the previous versions?
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
It doesn't try to be a clone.
OpenOffice.org includes interface and workflow design to make switching between MS Office and OOo easier. The developers are very well aware of the tradeoff between duplicating MS Office's rather haphazard menu/button layout and replacing it with something more logical but unfamiliar.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
People don't like when a new version of Microsoft Office looks different. People at my company, my wife's company, and many neighbors refused to use 2007 for a long time and even removed it on new computers to install an older version.
But when you finally learn the new version of Microsoft office you know you'll be able to use that learning at the office and friends' houses and other places. If you take the time to learn OO, there's a good chance you won't see it anywhere except your house.
When my wife had to learn to mail-merge on MS 2007 a year ago she just had to learn the sequence of menu/keys, but she knew the general process. I got her a new computer a couple of months ago and put OO on it. When she tried to mail-merge our Christmas cards she got very frustrated:
"I have an excel file. Why do I need to create a database from it?" (not a big deal once you learn, but I agree - why have to?)
"How do you remove duplicate rows in excel" (it's ugly if the help I found is correct, so she did it manually)
"Why is it printing 2 addresses on one envelope then none on the next?" (??? envelope size was right, everything else looked right. we started over and same thing. she printed them 1 at a time)
My kids and I have used OO for years on documents an simple spreadsheets without problems. This was my wife's first encounter with OO and probably her last.