You mean they shouldn't punnish corporation that harm the free market?
I think you might have an odd definition of "free market". IANAE, but it seems to me that a business protecting its interests against competition is a fundamental part of the free market concept.
You're the one with the odd definitions. If I protect my interests by hiring mercenaries to shoot anyone who goes into my competitor's business that's the free market since I'm just protecting my interests against competitors?!?
As soon as the government starts interfering, it's no longer a true "free market"
Umm, without government protections, there is no free market, just anarchy, which is decidedly unfree for everyone who doesn't have the most firepower.
The big selling point was that it was a relatively good FPS for the Xbox.
Actually it looked like it was going to be a very good game, but then it was delayed by a few years to completely rewrite most of it and "dumb it down" so it could be an XBox game as well. By the time it was released other companies had caught up to many of the new features.
Without the Xbox, Halo wouldn't have become massively popular.
Obviously console sales are a big bonus, but if it had come out two years earlier as a Mac/PC game it would have been quite popular in that market.
People wouldn't buy a Mac to play Halo...
It's funny because I knew people who bought Macs just to play Marathon II, the predecessor to Halo (which I might mention had a lot of functionality Halo had stripped out long before other FPS games). Bungie made some really good stuff before the acquisition.
How many rumours of Apple wanting to buy companies is Slashdot going to post this week?
Several. Slashdot posts news and lots of news articles are speculating about Apple acquisitions. Market analysts look at Cisco and similar companies and watch them using some of their large cash reserves for acquisitions. They look at Apple and wonder who Apple will buy. They discuss and speculate and articles are written. Slashdot readers enjoy "what ifs" and they get lots of comments.
EA might, by the way, actually be a reasonable move for Apple. We all know MS bought up their fair share of game companies and how it has worked for them.
Actually some aspects of the proposed laws do indeed get to the root of the problem.
Are you considering the root of the problem to be people's motivation to kill others or their ability to do so? I don't see how this addresses either.
For instance tightening the restrictions on how registered guns are stored...
While there is debate as to whether legislation like this helps or hurts the problem, let's assume for the sake of argument this law 100% stops others from accessing registered firearms. Does that solve the problem? Will the potential killer, thwarted by the government, go on to lead a productive life or will they kill people using poison or bombs or knives or any one of a hundred other methods? In some places, firearm bans have drastically reduced deaths with firearms... but at the same time death with clubs and fists and bombs have gone up more than enough to make up for said change. In a few south american countries you can go look at the many people maimed by drive by pipe bombs and molotov cocktail attacks... more dead and injured bystanders than there used to be. I think any attempt to address one tool used for committing violence against others is addressing part of one symptom, certainly not the root of the problem. That doesn't mean it is bad idea to address one symptom, but we need to be clinical about it instead of exploiting people's fears by taking action, with no evidence said action will result in any benefit.
Sadly the article seems to confuse install share and market share, not just confusing the phrases, but using them concepts interchangeably. For some uses, this does not matter, while for others it matters a great deal. That and the fact that the article ends with a cop out, "We have no way of knowing which is closest to the truth" makes this pretty useless.
Well, those companies have already paid for Office 97-2003, so the new application (OpenOffice) has to be at least as fast as their old application or the company will start using it only when their old computers break down.
Right, but companies currently are spending time reverse engineering.doc and other closed formats. They could be using that time to make their products faster.
While I see now why an open standard would be better, unless someone makes a plugin for MS Office 97 to support it, it won't be used here, because, well, why use something else if what you have works?
First, there is a plug-in for MS Office 97, written by Sun, and available for free. It works and was one of the products reviewed in TFA. Second, reasons to switch products might include wanting to standardize or wanting newer features. They might include wanting better ODF support for interoperability with governments moving to that as the standard or to ensure your files will open in 10 years without having to pay someone. You might simply want to add more machines to your office and not want to pay a licensing fee to MS for a new version of MS Office. You might want to add new, low end machines, that cannot even run current versions of MS Office.
Basically, ODF offers users flexibility and choice. Standardizing on ODF will be a slow process, but the end result is users can choose whatever word processor best suits them and that motivates MS to make their offering better instead of relying on format lock-in to keep you from using other products. That is, of course, unless they are allowed to continue with illegal tactics like this designed to keep their lock-in strong.
It seems they did follow the standard documents though and that's probably enough to get them off the hook...
I don't understand your reasoning for this belief. Legally, that makes no difference. They might try to claim it was unintentional and use the fact that is within the standard as support for that, but you'd have to be awfully gullible to buy that.
...so it doesn't matter that they implemented it differently from everyone else...
If their version works with other people's is exactly what matters, since the illegal part would be making their implementation not work with others as a way to leverage their monopoly to hurt those others. The fact that they're the only ones that are not interoperable makes for it pretty hard to argue they were unable to do so.
...hell, they can't even be expected to look at the OOo code to figure out the undocumented specifics because companies don't let their coders read code that could "taint" them and give anyone else a copyright claim over the output...
Umm, there is a BSD licensed plug-in that already works with MS Office. They can copy and paste the code directly into MS Office with no legal issues. They can certainly look at it and even if it was not BSD licensed, they have full rights to it since they funded the creation. Also, just looking at GPL code does not taint anyone.
While the end result is a tainted format I don't think a judge would rule against MS here because any ambiguity is the fault of the standard.
You're missing the point. Antitrust abuse is not failing to code to a standard, it is leveraging your monopoly against others. Whether they followed a standard or not has no bearing. It is exactly the end results that matter since antitrust abuse is judged by its affect upon the market.
Yes, they are. Spreadsheets are not just static tables of numbers
Some of them are.
and converting them to such is not "support"
No, but it is opening them, which is useful to many people, even if they have to manually recreate the formulas if they want them to automatically compute things going forward. It is also, barely, within the specification for ODF (as most people interpret it).
to MS (slighly feeble) defence, they cannot really go and look at the implementation of open source versions of the formula as they risk tainting their code (unless it's BSD style licences of course).
First, there is BSD licensed code that already works with MS Office. They can ore than look at it. They can copy and paste it into their program. Second, just looking at GPL code does not mean you can't implement the same thing in a closed source program. You just can't copy it exactly from their source. The "tainting" issue is only an issue for programs where the license forbids you from creating competing applications or where there are patents involved.
Same reason as why we should not look up patents!!
That's actually a CYA measure that only pertains to the damages phase of patent violations.
An open format is not always needed though. MP3 is supported by any device that supports reading audio off a file, but the "open" ogg format is not so supported.
MP3 and OGG are both published standards, just as ODF is..doc is a series of different file formats, but which are not fully published so others can create interoperable files. The difference between MP3 and OGG is that OGG is not patent encumbered, which is not at all the important difference between ODF and.doc or.xls.
at least in my country,.doc will be used for a long time, because everyone supports it.
Right, which means everyone will have to suffer with incompatibility issues upon occasion and they all have motivation to not move to other programs which may be better suited to their needs (free applications that have the needed features or even online services in some cases or word processors that run faster or have special features or support certain languages better) because they are locked into using.doc, the de facto standard.
The fact that this is the case is the result of MS's illegal actions and part of the reason why many governments and large organizations are pushing for a program agnostic format to replace MS's formats.
Well, at least it works on OO and MSOffice 97 -2007.
Sigh. That's the point. MS's market share allows them to artificially break other programs by making it really, really hard for those companies to writer interoperable programs, thus costing them money and slowing their ability to work on other aspects of their programs, like making them better or faster.
I also do not know if the "better" ODF works on MS Office prior to 2007 at all (does it have a converter?).
Yes, there are several, but whether it works or not is largely dependent upon MS, who is financially motivated to make it not work. And by that I mean they are motivated by making you pay for more licenses at a higher cost than the free market would normally determine.
Well, if I send a.doc file at least I know that almost everyone will be able to open it.
I strongly disagree. As a professional writer I've been in the position of trying to open old.doc files, and I often ended up setting up multiple VM's with old versions of Windows and MacOS and various versions of word, simply in order to export the files to a more modern format currently sold software can read. There are companies that make big money just taking your old Word files and translating them to PDFs and newer Word formats so they can be used again. Have you tried opening a ten year old Word file? Sometimes they open and sometimes they don't. Sometimes a different version of Wood will open them. Sometimes only OpenOffice will open them. Often they are at least partly garbled.
Moving to ODF doesn't guarantee that a given program will be able to open the ODF file 10 years from now, it just guarantees the information needed to do so will be available to any company that wants to add that functionality. For old.doc files, MS might have the info needed but never completely succeeds and everybody else is just reverse engineering and hoping for "good enough".
So, a standard was proposed and decided upon. It was then used to criticize Microsoft Office...
Nope. MS's actions and affects upon the market were used to criticize MS. The standard was a proposed way of stopping their illegal actions and preventing them in the future.
1) only a standard would ensure a durable document fidelity - i.e. that the document also in the future would be interpreted the same.
Wrong again. The standard ensured it could be interpreted the same if people made an effort to do so, not that it would be.
2) only a standard could guarantee interoperability.
Again wrong, the standard ensured that people could create interoperable programs, not that they could not interpret data differently if they so chose.
The problems between OpenOffice and MSOffice's implementations are that ODF implements a newer version of the spec and MS hasn't caught up to that
Oh, please! At least be honest! You want Microsoft to adhere to an yet undecided, still draft spec.
No, I want them to implement the drat spec or implement the spec by looking at the open source reference applications, or simply use the old spec in conjunction with Excel's formulas (which would work) or just use the code already written by MS that works in the MS Office plug-in. Any of those would be acceptable. The only thing that isn't acceptable is failing at simple interpretations tiny open source, hobby projects didn't have any problem implementing.
The draft spec defines the structure for a formula language, but the actual formulas are still just "whatever is in OpenOffice". Wasn't that exactly the argument against the OOXML spec...
It is not clear at all that they went out of their way. That's pure speculation.
Yeah, I have this bridge in Brooklyn you might be interested in.
No it was not... that is unless MS Office has been open sourced and I haven't heard about it. You can look at OpenOffice's relatively well documented source code and know what they're doing. You have to guess and reverse engineer MS Office and then you're never sure if it is right.
...but really, strict ODF compliance is their end goal because that is what can make or break contracts with governments and public institutions.
That doesn't make it legal or ethical. Why is it you don't understand the objection that what MS is doing hurts the market and innovation and breaks the law?
But one thing I distinctly remember was the ridicule on slashdot of the 6000 page spec. The allegation was that the Microsoft proposed standard was overly complex, bloated and they just wanted to pressure their standard through by swamping the process.
Gee, you think. Actually I remember a lot more ridicule of their abuse of the standards bodies and fast tracking a format without any open source reference implementations.
I mean, I was always suspicious that the *real* motives of the unholy Sun/IBM alliance was a jab to Microsoft and that they didn't *really* have a genuine interest in the standard.
Sigh. What would Sun or IBM's motivation be to undermine a standard? That only benefits you if you have a huge market share. Otherwise it hurts your ability to sell product. MS is the only one with motive for fighting real standards at this point.
Today I'm even more inclined to believe so because the standard (the first one even more so) was woefully incomplete, the primary implementation was and still is not in compliance (OOo writes application-specific settings so files which directly affects how the document is displayed - something another implementation cannot replicate).
Please, everyone except MS seems capable of writing programs to read and write ODF f
Formulas are part of the spreadsheet. If you can't open the formulas, you can't open the spreadsheet.
Formulas are part of the spreadsheet, true. They are not, however, necessarily vital to it. Just as CSS styling is not, necessarily, vital to a Web page... although it can be. If you can open the file and see the data, you can open the spreadsheet, even if you can't do so as well or with the full capabilities of other programs. MS Office opens the file. It's interpretation is weak and its ability to edit it and have things work as expected is not acceptably complete, but they do open the file.
Let's not confuse the issue with a semantic argument that opening the file isn't opening the spreadsheet. That's the kind of unclear writing that lead to this confusion in the first place and I don't think it is useful.
"Gracefully failing" is still failing.
Failing to interpret the formulas, yes. It is not, however, failing to open the file, nor is it technically failing to implement the spec, since that is what the spec says to do when you can't interpret the formula used.
MS Office will open the files, it just fails back on all the formulas and interprets the formulas as the last value.
That's a bit like saying Lynx is CSS-compliant.
No, it's like saying Lynx will open HTML pages that rely upon CSS and fail gracefully so they are readable, in reply to a comment that Lynx can't open HTML pages that use CSS.
Well, I don't see a problem with.doc (and.xls) format. It works in both MS Office and OpenOffice, so can be used to send documents between Linux and Windows systems.
The specs are not fully and completely documented in such a way that competitors can implement them on level footing with MS, nor do competitors have any say in extending those formats going forward. As such, they give MS an unfair advantage, due solely to their monopoly influence in the market. That stifles competition and results in competitors spending more time reverse engineering MS's formats and finding ways to implement features constrained by those formats and less time doing things to make their products better for end users. As a result it raises costs and stifles innovation in the market. That's illegal.
Since when is it illegal to implement file format support strictly according to the spec...
Since when is it illegal to fire a pistol? Well then, we'd better let all the people arrested for murder using pistols out of prison huh?
Any action that is leveraging their monopoly on office suite software to stifle competition is a violation of the law. When the antitrust laws were written they didn't specify every type of action that could be illegal, down to implementing specifications of standards. They wrote laws that applied to antitrust abuse. Implementing a specification in a way that intentionally does not interoperate with competitors, in order to harm those competitors, when you have monopoly influence on the market in question, is probably illegal, regardless of if it follows the spec or not.
It's not illegal for a company to refuse to support a given format.
That depends upon what you mean. There is no law that says you have to support all file formats, but then there's no law that says you can't fire pistols. Does the former imply it is always legal to not support a format and the latter imply it is always legal to fire a pistol, with no regard for the circumstances?
MS's intentionally poor support for ODF, especially if intentional, as it seems to be, is quite likely to be a violation of antitrust laws, given their overwhelming market share in the office suite market.
Is it illegal for Apple to make iPods that don't support ogg or wma?
Possibly WMA, in the US, or at least illegal for them to not support WMA while refusing to license and fully disclose all that is needed to use AAC+Fairplay on equal footing with Apple. Of course that is entirely dependent upon whether or not the court rule Apple to overwhelming market share in the relevant market (iPods) which is quite questionable. MS having overwhelming market share in the office suite market is much less so.
Sun is just as bad or worse than Microsoft by implementing incomplete standards leading to the same incompatibility that ODF is supposed to resolve.
Sun fully implements the very latest version of the spec. Maybe they should not use that as the default (probably a poor decision at this point) but that does not make them "just as bad as MS". Unlike MS Office, OpenOffice reads in all versions of ODF spreadsheets just fine. The fact that they write to the newer version has caused one incompatibility issue with the current version of Koffice which will soon be fixed and their documents work fine in everything else (except of course MS Office). Koffice gracefully fails using the fallback method.
MS Office, on the other hand, uses the failback method for everything, be it old or new versions of ODF. They are incompatible with every other implementation in this regard. Trying to equate the two is either very misguided or very disingenuous.
According to TFS, Office fails to load ODF files created by any other application.
This is not true. MS Office will open the files, it just fails back on all the formulas and interprets the formulas as the last value. They comply with the spec, but as minimally as possible, less usefully than any other products looked at including existing, BSD licensed plug-ins for MS Office.
Sure, it might be "incomplete" rather than "incorrect", but if we're talking about a standard for interoperability, doesn't "incomplete" pretty much imply "broken"?
No, because there exist several, open source reference implementations and those reference implementations (and the spec as far as it is defined) is identical to MS's already existing product. No one else seems to be having problems with documents that comply with the first version of the spec and they fail back gracefully when confronted with the new version of the spec. Only MS's implementation fails back when confronted with the first version of the spec because MS's Excel seemingly can't understand what Excel style formulas are. It's a bad joke... a criminally bad one.
Interesting. According the article referenced in the Wikipedia even OpenOffice and KOffice don't get along.
The difference is OpenOffice reads everything fine. KOffice fails to read the latest OpenOffice docs perfectly because OpenOffice uses the new draft version of the spec as the default... and it is perfectly appropriate for KOffice to fall back to reading those formulas as the last value until they release a new version of KOffice that supports the new spec. That is why there is a failback mode in the spec.
MSOffice, however, fails back even when reading the old version of the spec, because they seem to have decided understanding Excel style formulas in Excel was too hard, despite the existence of several open source implementations and the spec being the formulas they already use. The difference is huge. Koffice is doing the right thing and being reasonable. MS is going out of their way to be as poor at interoperability as the spec allows by feigning extreme incompetence. I mean, did you look at the chart in the article. Why is it even small, unfunded projects seem to work interoperably pretty well, while MS can't manage to work with anyone else's implementation. Do you truly believe they are that incompetent?
One the one hand we require Microsoft to follow specs to the letter, and now we somehow fault them for doing so?
No, we're faulting them for following the specs to the letter and at the same time going out of their way to make sure their technically compliant implementation still doesn't work with all the other, existing implementations.
What is wrong about asking OpenOffice to follow the specs?
ODF does, for the most part, follow the specs. The problems between OpenOffice and MSOffice's implementations are that ODF implements a newer version of the spec and MS hasn't caught up to that, and MS decided the suggested (but not required) formulas, which use the same syntax as Excel and for which their is already BSD licensed code that works in MS Office as a plug-in, were "too hard to understand" so they just strip all the formulas out.
MS may, technically, be minimally compliant with the spec, but it is clear they went out of their way to be as minimally compliant as possible to make their version as incompatible and unfriendly as they could manage while still being within the spec. This was not an honest attempt at being compatible, despite MS's claims that they were making an honest attempt.
What goes around comes around. ODF was initially just a clever assault launched by Sun and IBM.
Yeah, but it was an attempt to level the playing field and let products win based upon merits instead of criminal leveraging of monopolies. I don't understand why people have such a hard time understanding antitrust laws and how they work and why we have them.
OpenOffice and derivatives, Sun and IBM just have to eat their own dogfood. Admit that the "perfect" ODF was at least partly a hype.
No one claimed ODF was perfect and the early spec MS is using left room for ambiguity... which is why they also provided several open source reference implementations which everyone else has had no real problem implementing. Aside from MS, the only real problems are bugs between the stable and draft versions of the spec. MS is just playing dumb. "Oh they say if we can't understand Excel formula's, we can fail back to just reading the value the formula would produce. We're so stupid we can't understand formulas identical to the one we already use, har har, and we're too stupid to use the free BSD licensed implementation that already works with MSOffice, har har."
The "problem" with the ODF spec in this case is that they wrote it as a spec assuming it would be used to make interoperable implementations, instead of as an ironclad legal contract with no loopholes for dishonest companies that wanted to try to be compliant but as non-interoperable as possible. After all, only one company had motivation to do that, and for them to attempt it would be criminal. That doesn't seem to have stopped MS though, as usual.
The chickens are coming home to roost. Suck it up. Fix it instead of point fingers.
Please. They already have a draft that removes the ambiguity and it is already implemented by several companies. If MS were interested in being honest or even obeying the law, there would be no issue. There is room for more than finger pointing, MS should be prosecuted for one more criminal antitrust violation. Why do you hate free market competition so much?
MS, a for-profit company, refuses to embrace a format that gives an advantage to their open-source free competitors? Surely not!
Coca-Cola, a for-profit company, refuses to stop shooting farmers who want to be paid for their land which would cost them money, giving an advantage to their Pepsi competitors? Surely not!
I think what you're missing here, is MS's actions are ILLEGAL actions to hurt competitors, which normally is news. It's just that MS breaks the law so often and the laws are so poorly understood by the general public that many people aren't as outraged as one might expect. If another company were breaking the law to hurt smaller competitors would your attitude be the same?
But being able to correctly read ODF files would just be a big plus in an already great product like Excel. Why break the reading part?
Because they don't want to discourage just other products that use ODF, they want to slow and discourage adoption of ODF as a format. Anything that makes more users stick with MS proprietary formats longer, makes MS money. Every user who sends an ODF file from Google docs to an Excel user, then finds it doesn't work is discouraged from using Google docs and encouraged to buy a license for MSOffice so they can interoperate easily with that other person.
Slashdot Mirror
You mean they shouldn't punnish corporation that harm the free market?
I think you might have an odd definition of "free market". IANAE, but it seems to me that a business protecting its interests against competition is a fundamental part of the free market concept.
You're the one with the odd definitions. If I protect my interests by hiring mercenaries to shoot anyone who goes into my competitor's business that's the free market since I'm just protecting my interests against competitors?!?
As soon as the government starts interfering, it's no longer a true "free market"
Umm, without government protections, there is no free market, just anarchy, which is decidedly unfree for everyone who doesn't have the most firepower.
Well, Halo wasn't a spectacularly original FPS.
No, but it was based upon one.
The big selling point was that it was a relatively good FPS for the Xbox.
Actually it looked like it was going to be a very good game, but then it was delayed by a few years to completely rewrite most of it and "dumb it down" so it could be an XBox game as well. By the time it was released other companies had caught up to many of the new features.
Without the Xbox, Halo wouldn't have become massively popular.
Obviously console sales are a big bonus, but if it had come out two years earlier as a Mac/PC game it would have been quite popular in that market.
People wouldn't buy a Mac to play Halo...
It's funny because I knew people who bought Macs just to play Marathon II, the predecessor to Halo (which I might mention had a lot of functionality Halo had stripped out long before other FPS games). Bungie made some really good stuff before the acquisition.
How many rumours of Apple wanting to buy companies is Slashdot going to post this week?
Several. Slashdot posts news and lots of news articles are speculating about Apple acquisitions. Market analysts look at Cisco and similar companies and watch them using some of their large cash reserves for acquisitions. They look at Apple and wonder who Apple will buy. They discuss and speculate and articles are written. Slashdot readers enjoy "what ifs" and they get lots of comments.
EA might, by the way, actually be a reasonable move for Apple. We all know MS bought up their fair share of game companies and how it has worked for them.
Actually some aspects of the proposed laws do indeed get to the root of the problem.
Are you considering the root of the problem to be people's motivation to kill others or their ability to do so? I don't see how this addresses either.
For instance tightening the restrictions on how registered guns are stored...
While there is debate as to whether legislation like this helps or hurts the problem, let's assume for the sake of argument this law 100% stops others from accessing registered firearms. Does that solve the problem? Will the potential killer, thwarted by the government, go on to lead a productive life or will they kill people using poison or bombs or knives or any one of a hundred other methods? In some places, firearm bans have drastically reduced deaths with firearms... but at the same time death with clubs and fists and bombs have gone up more than enough to make up for said change. In a few south american countries you can go look at the many people maimed by drive by pipe bombs and molotov cocktail attacks... more dead and injured bystanders than there used to be. I think any attempt to address one tool used for committing violence against others is addressing part of one symptom, certainly not the root of the problem. That doesn't mean it is bad idea to address one symptom, but we need to be clinical about it instead of exploiting people's fears by taking action, with no evidence said action will result in any benefit.
Sadly the article seems to confuse install share and market share, not just confusing the phrases, but using them concepts interchangeably. For some uses, this does not matter, while for others it matters a great deal. That and the fact that the article ends with a cop out, "We have no way of knowing which is closest to the truth" makes this pretty useless.
Well, those companies have already paid for Office 97-2003, so the new application (OpenOffice) has to be at least as fast as their old application or the company will start using it only when their old computers break down.
Right, but companies currently are spending time reverse engineering .doc and other closed formats. They could be using that time to make their products faster.
While I see now why an open standard would be better, unless someone makes a plugin for MS Office 97 to support it, it won't be used here, because, well, why use something else if what you have works?
First, there is a plug-in for MS Office 97, written by Sun, and available for free. It works and was one of the products reviewed in TFA. Second, reasons to switch products might include wanting to standardize or wanting newer features. They might include wanting better ODF support for interoperability with governments moving to that as the standard or to ensure your files will open in 10 years without having to pay someone. You might simply want to add more machines to your office and not want to pay a licensing fee to MS for a new version of MS Office. You might want to add new, low end machines, that cannot even run current versions of MS Office.
Basically, ODF offers users flexibility and choice. Standardizing on ODF will be a slow process, but the end result is users can choose whatever word processor best suits them and that motivates MS to make their offering better instead of relying on format lock-in to keep you from using other products. That is, of course, unless they are allowed to continue with illegal tactics like this designed to keep their lock-in strong.
It seems they did follow the standard documents though and that's probably enough to get them off the hook...
I don't understand your reasoning for this belief. Legally, that makes no difference. They might try to claim it was unintentional and use the fact that is within the standard as support for that, but you'd have to be awfully gullible to buy that.
...so it doesn't matter that they implemented it differently from everyone else...
If their version works with other people's is exactly what matters, since the illegal part would be making their implementation not work with others as a way to leverage their monopoly to hurt those others. The fact that they're the only ones that are not interoperable makes for it pretty hard to argue they were unable to do so.
...hell, they can't even be expected to look at the OOo code to figure out the undocumented specifics because companies don't let their coders read code that could "taint" them and give anyone else a copyright claim over the output...
Umm, there is a BSD licensed plug-in that already works with MS Office. They can copy and paste the code directly into MS Office with no legal issues. They can certainly look at it and even if it was not BSD licensed, they have full rights to it since they funded the creation. Also, just looking at GPL code does not taint anyone.
While the end result is a tainted format I don't think a judge would rule against MS here because any ambiguity is the fault of the standard.
You're missing the point. Antitrust abuse is not failing to code to a standard, it is leveraging your monopoly against others. Whether they followed a standard or not has no bearing. It is exactly the end results that matter since antitrust abuse is judged by its affect upon the market.
Yes, they are. Spreadsheets are not just static tables of numbers
Some of them are.
and converting them to such is not "support"
No, but it is opening them, which is useful to many people, even if they have to manually recreate the formulas if they want them to automatically compute things going forward. It is also, barely, within the specification for ODF (as most people interpret it).
to MS (slighly feeble) defence, they cannot really go and look at the implementation of open source versions of the formula as they risk tainting their code (unless it's BSD style licences of course).
First, there is BSD licensed code that already works with MS Office. They can ore than look at it. They can copy and paste it into their program. Second, just looking at GPL code does not mean you can't implement the same thing in a closed source program. You just can't copy it exactly from their source. The "tainting" issue is only an issue for programs where the license forbids you from creating competing applications or where there are patents involved.
Same reason as why we should not look up patents!!
That's actually a CYA measure that only pertains to the damages phase of patent violations.
An open format is not always needed though. MP3 is supported by any device that supports reading audio off a file, but the "open" ogg format is not so supported.
MP3 and OGG are both published standards, just as ODF is. .doc is a series of different file formats, but which are not fully published so others can create interoperable files. The difference between MP3 and OGG is that OGG is not patent encumbered, which is not at all the important difference between ODF and .doc or .xls.
at least in my country, .doc will be used for a long time, because everyone supports it.
Right, which means everyone will have to suffer with incompatibility issues upon occasion and they all have motivation to not move to other programs which may be better suited to their needs (free applications that have the needed features or even online services in some cases or word processors that run faster or have special features or support certain languages better) because they are locked into using .doc, the de facto standard.
The fact that this is the case is the result of MS's illegal actions and part of the reason why many governments and large organizations are pushing for a program agnostic format to replace MS's formats.
Well, at least it works on OO and MSOffice 97 -2007.
Sigh. That's the point. MS's market share allows them to artificially break other programs by making it really, really hard for those companies to writer interoperable programs, thus costing them money and slowing their ability to work on other aspects of their programs, like making them better or faster.
I also do not know if the "better" ODF works on MS Office prior to 2007 at all (does it have a converter?).
Yes, there are several, but whether it works or not is largely dependent upon MS, who is financially motivated to make it not work. And by that I mean they are motivated by making you pay for more licenses at a higher cost than the free market would normally determine.
Well, if I send a .doc file at least I know that almost everyone will be able to open it.
I strongly disagree. As a professional writer I've been in the position of trying to open old .doc files, and I often ended up setting up multiple VM's with old versions of Windows and MacOS and various versions of word, simply in order to export the files to a more modern format currently sold software can read. There are companies that make big money just taking your old Word files and translating them to PDFs and newer Word formats so they can be used again. Have you tried opening a ten year old Word file? Sometimes they open and sometimes they don't. Sometimes a different version of Wood will open them. Sometimes only OpenOffice will open them. Often they are at least partly garbled.
Moving to ODF doesn't guarantee that a given program will be able to open the ODF file 10 years from now, it just guarantees the information needed to do so will be available to any company that wants to add that functionality. For old .doc files, MS might have the info needed but never completely succeeds and everybody else is just reverse engineering and hoping for "good enough".
So, a standard was proposed and decided upon. It was then used to criticize Microsoft Office...
Nope. MS's actions and affects upon the market were used to criticize MS. The standard was a proposed way of stopping their illegal actions and preventing them in the future.
1) only a standard would ensure a durable document fidelity - i.e. that the document also in the future would be interpreted the same.
Wrong again. The standard ensured it could be interpreted the same if people made an effort to do so, not that it would be.
2) only a standard could guarantee interoperability.
Again wrong, the standard ensured that people could create interoperable programs, not that they could not interpret data differently if they so chose.
The problems between OpenOffice and MSOffice's implementations are that ODF implements a newer version of the spec and MS hasn't caught up to that
Oh, please! At least be honest! You want Microsoft to adhere to an yet undecided, still draft spec.
No, I want them to implement the drat spec or implement the spec by looking at the open source reference applications, or simply use the old spec in conjunction with Excel's formulas (which would work) or just use the code already written by MS that works in the MS Office plug-in. Any of those would be acceptable. The only thing that isn't acceptable is failing at simple interpretations tiny open source, hobby projects didn't have any problem implementing.
The draft spec defines the structure for a formula language, but the actual formulas are still just "whatever is in OpenOffice". Wasn't that exactly the argument against the OOXML spec...
It is not clear at all that they went out of their way. That's pure speculation.
Yeah, I have this bridge in Brooklyn you might be interested in.
No it was not... that is unless MS Office has been open sourced and I haven't heard about it. You can look at OpenOffice's relatively well documented source code and know what they're doing. You have to guess and reverse engineer MS Office and then you're never sure if it is right.
...but really, strict ODF compliance is their end goal because that is what can make or break contracts with governments and public institutions.
That doesn't make it legal or ethical. Why is it you don't understand the objection that what MS is doing hurts the market and innovation and breaks the law?
But one thing I distinctly remember was the ridicule on slashdot of the 6000 page spec. The allegation was that the Microsoft proposed standard was overly complex, bloated and they just wanted to pressure their standard through by swamping the process.
Gee, you think. Actually I remember a lot more ridicule of their abuse of the standards bodies and fast tracking a format without any open source reference implementations.
I mean, I was always suspicious that the *real* motives of the unholy Sun/IBM alliance was a jab to Microsoft and that they didn't *really* have a genuine interest in the standard.
Sigh. What would Sun or IBM's motivation be to undermine a standard? That only benefits you if you have a huge market share. Otherwise it hurts your ability to sell product. MS is the only one with motive for fighting real standards at this point.
Today I'm even more inclined to believe so because the standard (the first one even more so) was woefully incomplete, the primary implementation was and still is not in compliance (OOo writes application-specific settings so files which directly affects how the document is displayed - something another implementation cannot replicate).
Please, everyone except MS seems capable of writing programs to read and write ODF f
Formulas are part of the spreadsheet. If you can't open the formulas, you can't open the spreadsheet.
Formulas are part of the spreadsheet, true. They are not, however, necessarily vital to it. Just as CSS styling is not, necessarily, vital to a Web page... although it can be. If you can open the file and see the data, you can open the spreadsheet, even if you can't do so as well or with the full capabilities of other programs. MS Office opens the file. It's interpretation is weak and its ability to edit it and have things work as expected is not acceptably complete, but they do open the file.
Let's not confuse the issue with a semantic argument that opening the file isn't opening the spreadsheet. That's the kind of unclear writing that lead to this confusion in the first place and I don't think it is useful.
"Gracefully failing" is still failing.
Failing to interpret the formulas, yes. It is not, however, failing to open the file, nor is it technically failing to implement the spec, since that is what the spec says to do when you can't interpret the formula used.
MS Office will open the files, it just fails back on all the formulas and interprets the formulas as the last value.
That's a bit like saying Lynx is CSS-compliant.
No, it's like saying Lynx will open HTML pages that rely upon CSS and fail gracefully so they are readable, in reply to a comment that Lynx can't open HTML pages that use CSS.
It's satire, genius.
Well, I don't see a problem with .doc (and .xls) format. It works in both MS Office and OpenOffice, so can be used to send documents between Linux and Windows systems.
The specs are not fully and completely documented in such a way that competitors can implement them on level footing with MS, nor do competitors have any say in extending those formats going forward. As such, they give MS an unfair advantage, due solely to their monopoly influence in the market. That stifles competition and results in competitors spending more time reverse engineering MS's formats and finding ways to implement features constrained by those formats and less time doing things to make their products better for end users. As a result it raises costs and stifles innovation in the market. That's illegal.
Since when is it illegal to implement file format support strictly according to the spec...
Since when is it illegal to fire a pistol? Well then, we'd better let all the people arrested for murder using pistols out of prison huh?
Any action that is leveraging their monopoly on office suite software to stifle competition is a violation of the law. When the antitrust laws were written they didn't specify every type of action that could be illegal, down to implementing specifications of standards. They wrote laws that applied to antitrust abuse. Implementing a specification in a way that intentionally does not interoperate with competitors, in order to harm those competitors, when you have monopoly influence on the market in question, is probably illegal, regardless of if it follows the spec or not.
It's not illegal for a company to refuse to support a given format.
That depends upon what you mean. There is no law that says you have to support all file formats, but then there's no law that says you can't fire pistols. Does the former imply it is always legal to not support a format and the latter imply it is always legal to fire a pistol, with no regard for the circumstances?
MS's intentionally poor support for ODF, especially if intentional, as it seems to be, is quite likely to be a violation of antitrust laws, given their overwhelming market share in the office suite market.
Is it illegal for Apple to make iPods that don't support ogg or wma?
Possibly WMA, in the US, or at least illegal for them to not support WMA while refusing to license and fully disclose all that is needed to use AAC+Fairplay on equal footing with Apple. Of course that is entirely dependent upon whether or not the court rule Apple to overwhelming market share in the relevant market (iPods) which is quite questionable. MS having overwhelming market share in the office suite market is much less so.
Sun is just as bad or worse than Microsoft by implementing incomplete standards leading to the same incompatibility that ODF is supposed to resolve.
Sun fully implements the very latest version of the spec. Maybe they should not use that as the default (probably a poor decision at this point) but that does not make them "just as bad as MS". Unlike MS Office, OpenOffice reads in all versions of ODF spreadsheets just fine. The fact that they write to the newer version has caused one incompatibility issue with the current version of Koffice which will soon be fixed and their documents work fine in everything else (except of course MS Office). Koffice gracefully fails using the fallback method.
MS Office, on the other hand, uses the failback method for everything, be it old or new versions of ODF. They are incompatible with every other implementation in this regard. Trying to equate the two is either very misguided or very disingenuous.
According to TFS, Office fails to load ODF files created by any other application.
This is not true. MS Office will open the files, it just fails back on all the formulas and interprets the formulas as the last value. They comply with the spec, but as minimally as possible, less usefully than any other products looked at including existing, BSD licensed plug-ins for MS Office.
Sure, it might be "incomplete" rather than "incorrect", but if we're talking about a standard for interoperability, doesn't "incomplete" pretty much imply "broken"?
No, because there exist several, open source reference implementations and those reference implementations (and the spec as far as it is defined) is identical to MS's already existing product. No one else seems to be having problems with documents that comply with the first version of the spec and they fail back gracefully when confronted with the new version of the spec. Only MS's implementation fails back when confronted with the first version of the spec because MS's Excel seemingly can't understand what Excel style formulas are. It's a bad joke... a criminally bad one.
Interesting. According the article referenced in the Wikipedia even OpenOffice and KOffice don't get along.
The difference is OpenOffice reads everything fine. KOffice fails to read the latest OpenOffice docs perfectly because OpenOffice uses the new draft version of the spec as the default... and it is perfectly appropriate for KOffice to fall back to reading those formulas as the last value until they release a new version of KOffice that supports the new spec. That is why there is a failback mode in the spec.
MSOffice, however, fails back even when reading the old version of the spec, because they seem to have decided understanding Excel style formulas in Excel was too hard, despite the existence of several open source implementations and the spec being the formulas they already use. The difference is huge. Koffice is doing the right thing and being reasonable. MS is going out of their way to be as poor at interoperability as the spec allows by feigning extreme incompetence. I mean, did you look at the chart in the article. Why is it even small, unfunded projects seem to work interoperably pretty well, while MS can't manage to work with anyone else's implementation. Do you truly believe they are that incompetent?
One the one hand we require Microsoft to follow specs to the letter, and now we somehow fault them for doing so?
No, we're faulting them for following the specs to the letter and at the same time going out of their way to make sure their technically compliant implementation still doesn't work with all the other, existing implementations.
What is wrong about asking OpenOffice to follow the specs?
ODF does, for the most part, follow the specs. The problems between OpenOffice and MSOffice's implementations are that ODF implements a newer version of the spec and MS hasn't caught up to that, and MS decided the suggested (but not required) formulas, which use the same syntax as Excel and for which their is already BSD licensed code that works in MS Office as a plug-in, were "too hard to understand" so they just strip all the formulas out.
MS may, technically, be minimally compliant with the spec, but it is clear they went out of their way to be as minimally compliant as possible to make their version as incompatible and unfriendly as they could manage while still being within the spec. This was not an honest attempt at being compatible, despite MS's claims that they were making an honest attempt.
What goes around comes around. ODF was initially just a clever assault launched by Sun and IBM.
Yeah, but it was an attempt to level the playing field and let products win based upon merits instead of criminal leveraging of monopolies. I don't understand why people have such a hard time understanding antitrust laws and how they work and why we have them.
OpenOffice and derivatives, Sun and IBM just have to eat their own dogfood. Admit that the "perfect" ODF was at least partly a hype.
No one claimed ODF was perfect and the early spec MS is using left room for ambiguity... which is why they also provided several open source reference implementations which everyone else has had no real problem implementing. Aside from MS, the only real problems are bugs between the stable and draft versions of the spec. MS is just playing dumb. "Oh they say if we can't understand Excel formula's, we can fail back to just reading the value the formula would produce. We're so stupid we can't understand formulas identical to the one we already use, har har, and we're too stupid to use the free BSD licensed implementation that already works with MSOffice, har har."
The "problem" with the ODF spec in this case is that they wrote it as a spec assuming it would be used to make interoperable implementations, instead of as an ironclad legal contract with no loopholes for dishonest companies that wanted to try to be compliant but as non-interoperable as possible. After all, only one company had motivation to do that, and for them to attempt it would be criminal. That doesn't seem to have stopped MS though, as usual.
The chickens are coming home to roost. Suck it up. Fix it instead of point fingers.
Please. They already have a draft that removes the ambiguity and it is already implemented by several companies. If MS were interested in being honest or even obeying the law, there would be no issue. There is room for more than finger pointing, MS should be prosecuted for one more criminal antitrust violation. Why do you hate free market competition so much?
MS, a for-profit company, refuses to embrace a format that gives an advantage to their open-source free competitors? Surely not!
Coca-Cola, a for-profit company, refuses to stop shooting farmers who want to be paid for their land which would cost them money, giving an advantage to their Pepsi competitors? Surely not!
I think what you're missing here, is MS's actions are ILLEGAL actions to hurt competitors, which normally is news. It's just that MS breaks the law so often and the laws are so poorly understood by the general public that many people aren't as outraged as one might expect. If another company were breaking the law to hurt smaller competitors would your attitude be the same?
But being able to correctly read ODF files would just be a big plus in an already great product like Excel. Why break the reading part?
Because they don't want to discourage just other products that use ODF, they want to slow and discourage adoption of ODF as a format. Anything that makes more users stick with MS proprietary formats longer, makes MS money. Every user who sends an ODF file from Google docs to an Excel user, then finds it doesn't work is discouraged from using Google docs and encouraged to buy a license for MSOffice so they can interoperate easily with that other person.