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UK Forces Microsoft To Adopt Open Document Standards
First time accepted submitter Barsteward writes Microsoft has confirmed it will start supporting the Open Documents Format (ODF) in the next update to Office 365, following a lengthy battle against the UK government. In 2014, Microsoft went against the government's request to support ODF, claiming its own XML format was more heavily adopted. The UK government refutes the claim, stating that ODF allows users to not be boxed into one ecosystem.
If the partition type is set to Linux, Windows won't offer to format it. Problem is the common parted tool wrongly uses the Microsoft partition type GUID, thinking it was a generic "basic data" type rather than a Microsoft specific one. Windows assumes such partitions aren't properly formatted if it can't read them. Patches took forever to be merged upstream and another forever for downstream distros to use. It's still being done wrong today. OS X will only ignore unrecognized partition type codes on disks containing recognized ones. Otherwise it too actively encourages the user to format, of course resulting in data loss.
Microsoft has caved many times. Remember the browser wars and unbundling IE?
Have you seen OOXML?
The reason they had to fork is because the format is SO binary and tied into the old legacy codebase that - even masquerading behind an XML front - there's no illusion of portability whatsoever.
They were forced to document it, by the EU, and all they did was describe every hack, binary fudge and kludge that went into it so that it was almost impossible to make a compatible format.
When you're talking Office on Mac, it's not a question of just adding Mac UI code and incorporating another platform into the build process. It's replicating all those stupid bit-wise assumptions made throughout the format. It's like WMF used to be - literally just a description of the Windows GDI commands required to replicate the object on the screen (which is why WMFs were capable of containing executable code!). That's pretty much the best analogue to something like MS's "open" XML formats.
I'm not surprised that the Mac versions are staggered by several years and not entirely compatible. That's how long it takes to emulate the Windows-specific fudges in the format.
What MS are scared of is a format that works across all platforms because, then, what's to say you'll bother to buy Office?
Excel also succeeded because it had no format lock-in. Because it could WRITE Lotus 1-2-3 just as well as it read it, there was no risk to using Excel and finding that it didn't perform as well as Lotus.
Lotus was the incumbent at the time. 1-2-3 was the killer app that drove adoption of the PC. Yes, Excel worked in pretty graphics mode. Yes, Excel was better than 1-2-3. But you've seen management clinging like limpets to older solutions to things just because of their elevated perception of risk. If Excel hadn't been able to read 1-2-3 files perfectly, it would never have happened.
It's exactly the same reason why people won't migrate from MS Office to LibreOffice - because it's not entirely compatible, and everyone else uses it. It's all but impossible to make an entirely compatible program though - because even the MOO-XML formats are just a serialization of binary structs and even *puke* Windows API calls. Office isn't a standalone program - it only works on Windows.
And from what I gather even their new .NET licensing terms are designed to leave you on the hook.
Chinese whispers...
(1) Microsoft adopts MIT license for .NET, a perfectly standard OSS license. Many people leave it at this, but MS additionally makes a "patent promise".
(2) Blog site reads the patent promise, notes that for most use of the .NET OSS you're covered by the patent promise, but there's apparently one particular case (where you write your own alternative .NET runtime/fx that's incomplete) that doesn't appear to be covered by the patent promise.
(3) Slashdot summary makes the leap to say that MS is "undecided about suing" users of its OSS.
(4) Burz makes the leap to say that this is actually "designed to leave you on the hook".
There are quite a few unjustified leaps in there. Burz, I wonder if you'd say the same about all OSS software that's licensed under MIT or BSD but which lacks a patent promise? Because such software would be in an even weaker state from your perspective than Microsoft's OSS .NET.
(disclaimer: I do work for Microsoft, and I did generate some patents for them, and I'm an engineer not a lawyer).
It is still there.
Only the top level "application" got removed. The actual application is in the DLLs that are still on disk.
Windows won't run if you actually did delete it.
one of the dlls is mshtml.dll and I know several applications that use it - anything that has an embedded browser for example, MS Money is one that uses a browser control as its entire display surface.
The other is ShDocVw,dll which is a browser control - Explorer uses this.
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-...