Microsoft Receives Open Source VIP Blessing 198
* * Beatles-Beatles writes to let us know that Larry Rosen has given his blessing to the new terms that Microsoft is Making their Office XML Reference Schema available under. Rosen, "the attorney that wrote the book on open source licensing and the man who was the Open Source Initiative's first general counsel and secretary," described this move as the "most significant olive branch to date" to come from the Redmond software giant.
Is this really open source ? (Score:5, Insightful)
Good on Microsoft... (Score:5, Insightful)
Come on guys, cut down the flames and lets think... its only a SMALL start but it is a very significant start. While this might be a one-off tactical move its from one of the most important divisions in Microsoft, its an important move. This is Microsoft ACTIVELY accepting and PROMOTING an Open Source licensing model.
Dinosaurs take a long time to turn (remember IBM?)... has the first synapse fired?
Applaud them when they do good things, it gives more weight to your later critisism.
Re:Good on Microsoft... (Score:5, Insightful)
Personaly, I will wait and see how real this is. So far, every single time that MS has done something to support a standard or OSS, it turns out to be a trap. Think in terms of their recent attempt at stopping spam via DNS.
Since when... (Score:1, Insightful)
Back on track. Either way, MS will support both file formats in their Office Suite. This just means that OOo gets to add Office XML support without having to work it out themselves.
Re:Submitter is a link spammer-stop posting his st (Score:4, Insightful)
Slashdot needs content and the guy is providing it. If he's profitting from it, well good for him. He's smarter than the rest of us.
Re:Good on Microsoft... (Score:3, Insightful)
Here is a dumb thought (Score:3, Insightful)
Don't get me wrong. I get tired of the trollers here (ifwm comes to mind). But if they are not impacting you or the site (and if they are actually helping it), then who cares?
Let's wait for the licence of patents (Score:5, Insightful)
What Microsoft is likely to do is:
- add own extentions and not release them
- forbid relicencing of patents so that no implementation can be released under LGPL / GPL
IMHO this is just a trick. MS wants everybody to wait for 18 months before this is really released, and prevent Open Source competition with patent licence restrictions.
We'll see this after two years, I hope I'm wrong but if this happends, I'll come back and say:
See, I told you so!
Eleknader
Re:Isn't XML readable anyways? (Score:5, Insightful)
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<legalnote>
<warning>This document scheme is patented, copyright protected and trademarked</warning>
<uspto>US1234567</uspto>
</legalnote>
<blob type="binary" encryption="proprietary 40-bit">
<key type="public" enc="hex">
e5e9fa1ba31ecd1ae84f75caaa474f3a663f05f4
bd30361aa855686bde0eacd7162fef6a25fe97bf
</key>
<data enc="hex">
2bb80d537b1da3e38bd30361aa855686bde0eacd
7162fef6a25fe97bf527a25bb1da3e38bd30361a
</data>
</blob>
<blob type="image" codec="proprietary">
<data enc="hex">
30361aa855686bde0eacd7162fef6a25fe97bf527a25b
2bb80d537b1da3e38bd30361aa855686bde0eacd30361
</data>
</blob>
Re:Back in Mass. (Score:5, Insightful)
That MS chose to present that as if they were being excluded is more about MS' fear of competition and the free market than about reality.
Re:Is this really open source ? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Isn't XML readable anyways? (Score:5, Insightful)
1) Patents/licenses.
Do Microsoft have any patents to any methods/techniques in the XML schemas? Patents seem to be granted on pretty much anything, nowadays (that's another discussion), but even if it's non-valid, open source-developers can rarely afford to either contest or license use of a patent.
If Microsoft makes a blanket license to use any patented method they might have claim on relating to the format, no questions asked, and with a right to sublicense, kudos to them. If not, it's not an open format.
There was also some technicalities regarding "a conforming implementation". Does this mean that you're not allowed to implement support for any extensions that are non-conforming to the specification? Are Microsoft the only ones allowed to do that? (Microsoft doesn't actually have a good track-record for following specifications - not even their own ones).
That leads us into point 2:
2) Is Microsoft itself going to conform to the specification, or are they going to embrace and extend their own formats? If they are, this means that the situation won't be much better than today, as we're forever stuck with reverse-engineering "the newest Microsoft Office formats". Making an XML specification itself changes nothing. The value in this XML specification coming from Microsoft, is that it promises interoperability with and long-term-archivability of documents written in Microsoft office, something that's been problematic up to now.
If this is just a "snapshot", however, something that some version of Microsoft office once used, but you can't be sure that *any* Microsoft Office-document can be opened with just implementing the specification, we gain nothing. Nothing at all. Then, it's just a fake bone, a PR-stunt, to keep off ODF competition.
ODF of course have the same problems, but at least that format comes from the open source world, which means that at least the open source implementations (that are likely to become the "reference implementations") can be studied to see what the hell they have changed and why they're not conforming.
- Vegard
Re:Isn't XML readable anyways? (Score:3, Insightful)
Seriously, and I'm not joking here, it looks a whole lot more human-readable than perl or regexps. And as long as it can be converted easily (I assume excellent ODFdocx converters to be available soon if not now), will the implementation details matter? The only thing that really matters is if Microsoft starts doing "embrace and extend" with undocumented and purposefully obfuscated elements or attributes. While the format looks very convoluted, it wouldn't be a big job to "reverse engineer" docx as it is today without documentation.
yawn (Score:5, Insightful)
In short: Sure they'll release specs. And just as certainly that which is actually implemented in the next office version will be something different. Probably minor, but crucial differences. Minor enough to be able to say "*shrug*, we just made a few updates and extensions" and crucial enough to prevent interoperability.
Re:Submitter is a link spammer-stop posting his st (Score:2, Insightful)
MS XML Format sucks (Score:3, Insightful)
Also, it still isn't as open as OpenDocument. Partly for the reason that Microsoft isn't open to contributions to the format, and that they dictate what the format will be like.
How about a... (Score:3, Insightful)
Sorry again for the offtopic...
Re:Isn't XML readable anyways? (Score:4, Insightful)
True, but neither embedded binary information nor obfuscated tags are irrelevant since we are discussing whether opening up the XML formats will actually result in an open standard which can be implemented by competitors.
The point I tried to make is that there is a large number of tricks (binary data, links to external data in proprietary formats, patents, obfuscation, writing non-compliant documents, "extending" the standard, etc) which can be utilized to create non-interoperable file formats even if they are based on XML...creating a good and genuinely open XML format requires the will to do so...and somehow I have the feeling that the will of some parties is not that strong.
Let's get technical! (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Back in Mass. (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft doesn't "respond to the market". Microsoft "protects its monopoly".
In this instance, Microsoft saw a significant threat to its MS Office monopoly when Massachusetts decided to support an open document format that others and Microsoft could support. That removed a key advantage that Microsoft holds, i.e., the ability to completely control the document format(s) of office productivity products.
Once Microsoft has lost the advantage of file format control, where is Microsoft's advantage?
Microsoft's biggest fear is having to compete in an open, fair marketspace, without having the ability to leverage its desktop monopoly, or proprietary file formats and protocols, to lock up new markets.
Still Does Not Meet MA's Definition Of Open (Score:5, Insightful)
Now of course I fully expect crooked politics and money to fix that little loop hole.
Re:Good on Microsoft... (Score:3, Insightful)
Careful there. I got into professional coding in '86. After doing that for a few years, I realized that IBM was the great evil and not to be trusted. So at that time, I figured that IBM would be the great evil of all time and spent the next few years working on MS and pushing it everywhere. Things changed, showing that I was wrong.
Down the road, we may find that MS will adopt OSS to keep from following SGI, Word Perfect, and Intuit (all these companies will most likely fall for competing head on against MS).
Horse Cart (Score:4, Insightful)
Personally, if MS ever does fully release their current MSWord Document Format to to the public, my belief is that two things will happen:
1: It will become the default save format, and essentially require everyone back to the days of Word 95/97 to upgrade to the next Office suite giving MS lots of $$$ that the haven't been able to get otherwise with their bloatware releases of features almost nobody needs -- except to read documents from other people.
2: The moment XML Doc comes into use, MS will introduce Enhanced Document+ as their preferred format, complaining that they need to get new important features to the user as quickly as possible and that the standards process is too slow for this. Of course by the time that ED+ format is standardized and implmeneted by anyone besides MS (who didn't announce this to anyone until they had their fully debugged version rolling off the CD presses) MS will again be years ahead of the competition. They'll just wear down the other implementers on the basis of their larger bankroll to pay for new development, and this post will become an interesting historical curiosity under the I-Told-You-So department of Slashdot.