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Microsoft to Open up Office Formats
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Mon Nov 21, 2005 06:02 PM
from the learning-from-your-mistakes dept.
from the learning-from-your-mistakes dept.
Been on TV writes to tell us that Microsoft is expected to announce on Tuesday the opening of their Office file formats, according to Financial Times. From the article: "Microsoft will submit its Office file formats to Ecma International, the standards body, which will develop the documentation and make it available to the industry. The move is being supported by a number of organizations including Apple Computer, Barclays Capital, BP, Intel and Toshiba."
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Licensing (Score:4, Insightful)
2 cents,
Queen B
Re:Licensing (Score:5, Funny)
2 cents,
I hear 2 cents of a soul. Do I hear five cents? Three cents? It's not much to look at anyway, is it? Going once, going twice...
Parent
Re:Licensing (Score:5, Insightful)
You've certainly come to the right place.
Parent
Re:Licensing (Score:5, Insightful)
a standard != the standard
Just so you know, C# is standardized by the ECMA. Does that make it the only programming language in the world? Uuuh nope.
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Re:Licensing (Score:5, Insightful)
-Will they allow changes in the standard after submission?
-Will they use those changed standards in their own products?
-Will they not release new formats until approved by the standards board?
One of the problems with OO.o, and a lot of other software that clones existing document formats, is that they're always late to the game. If Microsoft released Office 12 today with a new document format that no one has seen, even if it was immediately released to the standards body it would be months or years until an open source product could be released that would duplicate the format. As long as Microsoft leads, everyone else has no choice but to follow.
TW
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Re:Licensing (Score:5, Insightful)
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Indeed (Score:5, Insightful)
I get the sense that Microsoft may take a security through obscurity approach with this. Make it a pain in the butt for somebody else to implement. Then keep adding new stuff to it so that there's always subtle incompatibilities with older software. A "open" format is of minimal value if third parties have to struggle to keep up with the standard.
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Re:Licensing (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Licensing (Score:5, Insightful)
The first is common and acceptable. The latter is a deliberate attempt to look good while not being good.
Don't pretend you don't know that.
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Re:Licensing (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:Licensing (Score:4, Insightful)
But will support for it in MSOffice be perpetual? I mean support for existing office formats isn't guaranteed between one version and the next. The new format could be in MSOffice for long enough to capture the vast majority of Government and enterprise contracts before a free upgrade installs a new new format that imports the free one but only saves out to the new version.
OK, so level criticism for an over cynical approach but if a car dealer sells me 10 piles of crap in a row it'd take more than a promise to be nice this time to convince me that that they've changed.
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Re:Licensing (Score:4, Interesting)
We've seen other such licenses that have turned out to be very misleading. For example, if I use the license and write software that implements the specs, can I legally sell my software? The fact that I have a license doesn't mean that I can pass the license on to others in my products.
There are lots of potential legal gotchas in a lot of "free" licenses. Given MS's history, a bit of paranoia is in order here. We need people suggesting ways that they can turn around and sue us into bandruptcy if we use their specs. Then we need assurances that they won't sue us in any of those ways. And we need lawyers looking at the assurances and telling us whether they're legally meaningful, or whether we might get sued anyway.
After all, consider the RIAA. Who'd have ever thought that someone could be sued for buying a recording, sticking it into their own sound equipment and playing the music? But that's happening these days. We've even just had a story of recordings that intentionally damage our playing equipment when we attempt to play the music.
Paranoia here is quite appropriate.
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Really read it... and then weep (Score:5, Informative)
"Microsoft may have patents and/or patent applications that are necessary for you to license in order to make, sell, or distribute software programs that read or write files that comply with the Microsoft specifications for the Office Schemas."
and that's why this has never been acceptable to the open-source community.
Steven
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Having an effect (Score:4, Insightful)
Let me be the first to say... (Score:4, Funny)
Define "open up" (Score:4, Interesting)
I hope they really open up the format. Otherwise it'd be as bad as RIAA promoting DRM "for freedom". Sigh.
Re:Define "open up" (Score:4, Insightful)
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MS is opening up the Office 12 XML format. (Score:4, Informative)
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Seems To Only Count For Writing (Score:5, Interesting)
I suppose people can take the information on how to write a valid "clean" Office format to make better format translators but we are still hosed for various random files that will be generated and only readible in sanctioned applications.
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On The Contrary... (Score:4, Insightful)
As I said before, it is interesting they are specifying how to write out proper Office Xml but it is somewhat meaningless for everyone but Office to understand how to read it properly. We can understand the heck out of how to write files and still end up with a lot of tinkering on how to read it in where two implementations interpt the format differently.
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18 months? (Score:5, Interesting)
It seems odd that it will take 18 months to develop documentation for the file formats. Sure, the formats must be complex, but it seems like maybe this documentation organization might not be a truly independent standards body.
Ecma's wiki and site seems to be pretty much confirm that they're composed of manufacturer members. I wouldn't consider them the equivalent of ANSI or UL. 18 months of work by a collusive industry is more throwing those governments a bone than actually getting the work done right.
I guess there should be some applause for getting the ball rolling. Uphill?
Re:18 months? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's worse than that. Like RTF, they will change the formats arbitrarily with every revision of office, and will then probably take 18 months to document each new version. And of course they will claim this is complete openness and interoperability, ignoring that they're keeping 3rd parties 18 months behind...
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Re:18 months? (Score:5, Interesting)
A related point that I'm wondering about: When the standards specs are complete, how will I get them? Will they be online? Or will I have to pay and sign an NDA to get a copy?
This isn't an idle distinction. I well remember, back in the 1980's, working on networking projects where we really wanted to get the OSI stuff up and running alongside IP, to compare them. A problem was that the OSI specs weren't online; they could only be ordered in print. By the time we got a purchase order approved, an order sent, and the docs delivered, we had long since downloaded the RFCs for the internet equivalent and implemented it all. And part of the problem was that we had to hand-type the stuff from the OSI specs, leading to lots of typos and extra time to spot the typing errors. The IP docs could be directly copied to the code without error. (And yes, I am one of those weirdos who writes perl scripts that read spec docs and spit out code. I've gotten all sorts of funny reactions from people when they first discover those entries in my makefiles.
The end result was that our OSI code could never catch up with the IP code. It couldn't even come close, simply due to the delays in dealing with for-pay, on-paper specs when the competitor was instantly available online in machine-readable form.
If we'd had to sign NDAs for the OSI stuff, we'd never have gotten anywhere. But then, I guess we really didn't anyway, because all that OSI code is now dead and forgotten.
I can see ECMA using a similar approach to delay us "open source" geeks, so they can hold it semi-private while oh-so-innocently pretending to have opened it all. It'll likely be open in the same sense as the OSI specs, but maybe with NDAs. With MS's marketing clout, the effect won't be to eliminate those formats from the market. The main effect will be a big drag on developers' time, as they try to jump through all the hoops required to get something working.
I do expect that 6 months from now, we'll be hearing a lot of "Hey, we opened the formats, but nobody else has implemented them. Our competitors must be intentionally ignoring them; or maybe they're just incompetent." No mention of the fact that the specs haven't been published yet. And, if computing history is any guide, that 18-month estimate means at least 3 years, probably more.
This sort of thing isn't what you'd call a efficient. But I don't suppose anybody ever called software a rational market.
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What about patents ? (Score:5, Informative)
Having a standard != Strictly following a standard (Score:5, Insightful)
Write not read (Score:5, Insightful)
This is going expose only a way to write to these formats. It says absolutely nothing about how to read documents created by their proprietary packages. It's much easier to say "here's how to create a valid document" without giving away all of the keys to the kingdom than it is to explain fully "here's how to read any document created by our suite" (and you have to presume they'll intentionally leave out the good stuff).
As far as I can tell, this is a no-op.
Parent
Re:Write not read (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, on the admittedly limited chance that you're not trolling, and that instead you'll actually consider a reasoned response with an open mind, I'll try one more time. First, yes, we "idiots" do know exactly what we're talking about, so I honestly hope you'll bother to read and possibly even learn something.
The fine example you gave is a trivially simple and quite static format, similar to an image. It is far from complex and dynamic enough to describe any useful arbitrary document. If you'd actually re-read the post to which you replied, you'd find a much more relevant example, that of HTML. HTML can't be described as a basic C-style structure like your example, but a formal grammar such as BNF (or a DTD for XHTML) could be used. However, you can very easily omit many optional flags/features when describing how to write a valid document in any such format. As noted, I might only tell you only about the head, title, and body tags, and perhaps the h1-h7 tags as well.
Is it possible for me to neglect to tell you about all the other formatting tags (like b and i and friends) and even "forget" to mention the whole hyperlink concept with the "a" tag? Sure it is. Can you write a valid document? Sure you can. Now, can you really read all possible documents, including those that use the tags I so conveniently neglected to describe? No.
Let's even use your own example, with a modification:
long version 0x0100
long number of strings 0x0002
long string length
string
long string length
string
long number of options 0x0001
int option_num
int option_length
byte [] option_data
EOF
Here you see that I've told you how and where to add multiple options. However, I've not told you what options are valid. I might only tell you about some of the options and not others. You can always still write a document given that format, but you can't read all documents unless you've been told all the possible valid options.
So, really I hope this hasn't been a waste of time, and that you can see that Microsoft can choose to give out any arbitrary amount of detail for how to write a proper and valid document, without giving sufficient tools with which to parse all possible valid documents.
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Ogg Vorbis, Png, and Odt benefit everyone (Score:5, Insightful)
The PNG format, in addition to being far superior to GIF, kept Unisys from taking too much legal action against GIF; the little legal action they took increased cross-browser PNG compatibility to the point that people can safely put non-transparent PNG images on their web pages today.
Odt will benefit everyone because this format gives Microsoft a clear message to open up their
Re:Ogg Vorbis, Png, and Odt benefit everyone (Score:4, Insightful)
What this means in practice is that there is no reason whatsoever to use GIF. PNGs are smaller in virtually all cases, they are free and patent unencumbered, and are a W3C standard. The whole notion that PNGs are broken is limited to features that PNG supports that GIF does not support, like alpha blending. Furthermore, if you can forgo alpha, you can use all sorts of features with PNG that GIF does not support (the most obvious being more than 256 colors).
The reason I think so few people realize this is because for some reason, creating 8-bit PNGs in most software suites seems to be a pain in the ass. I haven't done web dev for a while now, but I remember creating PNGs in the GIMP, drawing them out using only full opacity/full transparency, and still getting an 8-bit alpha channel (which of course produces the ugly gray blotches in IE a previous poster was talking about) when saving them with the GIMP. The answer of course was to tweak them with pngcrush from the command line.
More pain than it's worth, certainly, but as soon as you get 8-bit PNGs with only a 1-bit alpha channel, they display just fine in all browsers except the text-based ones.
Don't use GIF. The patent issue is moot now, but the compression used in PNGs is much better than GIFs and if your site gets accessed at all frequently you will save money on bandwidth using PNG.
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And.. (Score:4, Insightful)
End of times... (Score:5, Funny)
Dogs and cats, living together! MASS HYSTERIA!
First Question (Score:4, Interesting)
Well, according to TFA, it's because of the European Commission has been urging companies to open up their document formats, and Microsoft feared the EC would stop using Microsoft's formats for the creation of public documents, and urge national governments to do the same.
So, thumbs up for the EU on this one!
Pull the other one! (Score:5, Insightful)
1. Microsoft promising something 18 months down the road is meaningless. Hell, ANY tech company promising something 18 montsh out is meaningless.
2. This announcement is for Europe, without software patents.... for now. Of course if in 18 months there just HAPPEN to be software patents and said patents are licensed under their no-GNU terms... oh well, who wants to support smelly hippies anyway.
3. The only promised the ability to write, kida curious since most of the EU objections are about random folk being able to READ their government's output.
4. There is no committment to continue using this 'standardized' format in any future product. So there is nothing to provent them from releasing a future Office that uses an 'embraced and extended' version and either not documenting the changes at all or another 18 months after it ships.
here. see? it's open! (Score:4, Insightful)
Against government use of OASIS format (Score:5, Informative)
I wonder what kind of impact Microsoft hopes to achive by doing this.
Fully documenting the Microsoft Office file formats and permissively licensing any essential patents could help dissuade governments from migrating to OASIS OpenDocument format, which happens to be the native format of a competing software package called OpenOffice.org 2.x.
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My take (Score:5, Insightful)
Now, many of the reasons for switching to open document will be nullified, and if Microsoft's doc becomes the standard, the burden will be on the OSS community to make changes to their software rather than the other way around.
Basically, it's MS's way of waying, "You want openness? Fine, but if we're going to play, we're going to play with our ball."
I think it would be awesome to see MS support an open standard. This seems like kind of a petty way to go about it, but that's the Microsoft we all love to hate, right?
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Re:Hold on... (Score:4, Insightful)
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Will change nothing (Score:5, Insightful)
Thank you for restating the theory and hope behind OSS, now for reality
MS had previously published Word and Excel formats. They did so as they took over the market, as they destroyed the competition. The competitions support for Word and Excel formats further reinforced those proprams as the defacto standards.
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Re:Will change nothing (Score:5, Insightful)
If you are only able to profit off of service contracts, you can't 'write once, reach many' like you can with COTS software. Moreover, companies like IBM and Novell which have large established sales and service teams will win all the larger contracts.
If you write a great peice of software, and then have to sell, educate the customer AND hire/train all the workforce, how much time are you going to have to devote to Rev. 2 of your world beating product?
Whenever folks talk about OSS in the context of markets, I think it should be with a jaundiced eye towards our "helpmates" at IBM, Novell, SAP/MySQL and Sun.
Ultimately, IBM et al are about making money for shareholders, if they didn't see that as the likley outcome, they would not be out there pimping OSS.
I think a world where software is only 'sold' in the context of a service contract is bad for the next great idea. OSS is great in its place, but to preclude software for sale isn't the answer.
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Re:Hold on... (Score:4, Insightful)
Microsoft is opening their file formats because interoperability is king, open-source or closed.
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Re:Hold on... (Score:5, Insightful)
However, they wouldn't be waking up to this were there not a healthy looking and viable alternative in the form of OpenOffice, which, as well as delivering true ownership of the files, also provides (most of) the convenience, bells and whistles of the m$ software stable. So in that sense, open source is a driver of this pressure.
That's why I think the half-assed, quasi-open strategies discussed in some posts here do not present a real long-term option for m$ - once people are fully awake to the fact they don't really own their own data, only real open formats will solve m$'s marketing problem, and we'll see a real shift in the file-format landscape, of which this latest thing may be an early sign.
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Perhaps, but I suspect more of the same... (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft has historically "embraced" open industry standards by adding proprietary extensions, making its user's data worthless outside of the MS world.
In this case, I suspect they'll end up releasing, but still maintaining control over the office formats. If not there already, they'll make sure there's the ability to store proprietary objects (or meta-data, or whatever the current popular nomenclature is) in the now "open" format. They'll then simply move on to placing more and more document content in these proprietary closed objects, while claiming they're using an "open format."
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Re:Perhaps, but I suspect more of the same... (Score:5, Interesting)
Adobe has been doing it for years with the PDF format, and most people are ok with it.
Keeping control over the evolution of the format but having the specs fully open so as to allow completely compatible products is a good thing, I myself would appreciate it if MS did that.
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Re:Perhaps, but I suspect more of the same... (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Hold on... (Score:5, Interesting)
They're opening their file formats because they still has a trump card [slashdot.org]. Or has anyone forgotten about this?
A quick patch or two to Microsoft Office (now one of their biggest or the biggest ca$h cow - 1/3 of their profits?) and MS Office suddenly reads|writes XML format only. They aren't about castrating themselves voluntarily. They still have shareholders to keep happy, but more importantly, they want to be the trendsetters, no matter what.
How does this impact Open Office? Open Office can then read the XML Format because it's declared in the patent. But what O^2 won't be able to do is write the MS Office XML Format [except to violate the patent]. This means: no interoperability and any business which wants to migrate away from a closed system (MS Office) to Open Office can do so only as a one-way trip, burning the bridge behind them. And the company can't communicate both directions, so that forces a move en masse.
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Re:Models... (Score:5, Insightful)
At least F/OS Software is never truly dead. It may enter a state of dormancy or being a zombie, but it can always be brought back to life by anyone interested in doing so.
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Re: Hold on... (Score:4, Insightful)
All in all, it's probably just a ploy to soften up Massachusetts, claiming that their formats is as "open" as OpenDoc, while probably requiring license fees, or make alternative implementations very hard in one or another way.
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Re:catch? (Score:4, Insightful)
RTFA. They don't want to lose gov't business.
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Re:catch? (Score:4, Insightful)
I'd like to say Massachusetts going OSS scared them more than they wanted to admit in public, but I think MA was merely the last straw. Various countries have been pushing OSS over the last few years.
There's another article on the front page of
Someone high up finally decided that file interoperability is critical if they don't want to lose their client base. Not only will this move placate antitrust authorities, but it'll allow corporate IT guys justify the vendor lock-in they have to accept in order to get deep discounts on corporate licenses.
Don't forget that Support is a big deal for companies. They like to have support contracts to fall back on.
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Minor nitpick (Score:5, Insightful)
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