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Public Request For Microsoft To Release Deprecated File Formats
Posted by
Zonk
on Tue Jan 15, 2008 09:23 AM
from the don't-hold-your-breath dept.
from the don't-hold-your-breath dept.
SgtChaireBourne writes "NLnet, a Dutch foundation for an open information society, has publicly called for Microsoft to release its deprecated formats into the public domain. The maker of Office has made large efforts during the last year to move against the OpenDocument Format (ISO/IEC 26300). These efforts have been producing a lot of commentary regarding the amount of data bound up in the Redmond-based company's proprietary specifications. It's a nasty situation to end up with files that cannot be read because the sole vendor with the documentation for the files has withdrawn permission. ODF is the way forward, or a step forward at the least, with new documents. But for the old documents in the legacy formats, they cannot be read without supporting software and that support requires full access to the specifications."
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Inaccurate summary (Score:5, Informative)
Last time I checked "many different versions" of doc, xls, and ppt are NOT old, obsolete file formats. They're essentially asking MS to not only open up their old file formats (such as Word 97 and older doc files), they're also asking them to hand over the full specifications on all their EXISTING modern formats--a move that would allow comptetitors to develop Office clones at will.
This is a thinly disquised shot at MS and closed source formats, not some noble attempt to help out archives. If it wasn't, they would have limited this to older files only and also called on other companies that make other older, proprietary formats (like Corel, Adobe, etc.) to release all their specs too.
Re:Inaccurate summary (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Inaccurate summary (Score:5, Interesting)
All it would take is for Microsoft to release a fully compatible viewer/converter so that everybody can open the oldest of documents, and companies would likely cease to care.
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Re:Inaccurate summary (Score:5, Informative)
But they have done this for years [microsoft.com], and yet everybody still complains.
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Re:Inaccurate summary (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Inaccurate summary (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Inaccurate summary (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Inaccurate summary (Score:5, Insightful)
The point of a free market is that if the above conditions are not true, you should be able to do business with someone else, instead.
Relate this to Microsoft as you will. But keep in mind a few things...
- There are very few viable (The word "viable" can scope quite a few meanings, here.) competitors to Microsoft in many situations.
- Many times their real customer is not you, but someone else - a supplier of one sort or another. Your involvement may be many-times indirect.
- Microsoft has been found guilty of illegal monopoly practices in a court of law.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
MSFT is a for profit company which means they should sell products and services people are asking for. People are asking for converters for other OS's. MSFT doesn't even provide converters for OSX an OS which it does support. let alone for other OS's.
If your business is totally dependant on trade secret file formats then you had better be very careful. As the one day that so
Re:Inaccurate summary (Score:5, Insightful)
and seeing as the monopoly office suite is made by the same people who make the operating system, it would be trivial for them to not allow a competitor's products to run.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Inaccurate summary (Score:4, Informative)
Microsoft is a company that has been found guilty of the illegal leveraging of its monopoly. As such, a different set of laws apply to the sharing of Microsoft's intellectual property. We have already seen that Microsoft can be forced to share its protocols with competitors.
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Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Here you go [winehq.org].
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Re:Inaccurate summary (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:Inaccurate summary (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Inaccurate summary (Score:5, Insightful)
On the other hand, why should it be explicitly limited to old formats? All data should be in open formats for a huge number of reasons, archiving is just one of them.
And formats should be opened up while they are new, once they become old the specs often get lost (try opening a really old word document in the current version), often there never were any formal specs beyond "whatever the program outputs".
Finally as to other formats, yes they should request the release of other proprietary formats, but they are going after the biggest target first as it affects more people... As noble as it would be to get the format specs for Wordworth on the Amiga (a long forgotten app, and its original vendor wont sell me a new copy, give it to me for free, or release the source or any specs, their official line is that my documents are lost), this would only benefit a very small number of people. Also, microsoft disclosing their old formats would set a powerful precedent for others in the industry to follow.
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Anybody remember what happened to O
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Re:Inaccurate summary (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
If someone really cared about proprietary formats so much, they always had the option of saving their documents (or at least backups) in neutral formats like rtf. AFAIK, virtually every version of Office has supported these kinds of open formats. People don't use them because the VAST majority of users don't give a rat's ass about the propriety vs. open source issue. Is that MS's fault? I
Yeah but (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:Yeah but (Score:4, Insightful)
Once the company has stopped earning money on a format, they should open it up under an appropriate license. (Patents might play a part, in an ideal world they would not but let's play in this world for now). Microsoft does not make any money on Excel97. Why on earth be so mean to their previously paying customers that they refuse to open that obsolete standard?
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Microsoft cant do that (Score:5, Insightful)
Code are descriptions of formats.
When Microsoft was forced to disclose information about the SMB format to EU anti-trust department they tried to give them the source code - complaining that it cost them too much to describe the format.
So they are sadly asking for something that dont exists.
Re:Microsoft cant do that (Score:5, Interesting)
Considering the code for rendering the older .doc formats is now officially considered 'unsafe' by Microsoft, and has been disabled in Office 2007, perhaps releasing the code itself (or choice chunks of it) would be just as useful?
Surely if you have a chunk of code for a no longer supported format, which you consider too buggy and unsafe, which is 10 years old and which you've disabled in your latest products, you wouldn't mind letting other people clean it up for free, since it can't be of any commercial value?
Right?
--ducks the '-1 flamebait' mod---
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Conversion shouldn't be that hard (Score:3, Interesting)
That would get all your documents in the late
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And that is exactly what is wrong with MSFT. no one on the inside have bothered to document what has been done. ballmer just throws a bunch of coders into a room, and tells them it has to work or chairs will be thrown into the room(not true, I hope).
Everyone else Documents their stuff so that any o
Re:Microsoft cant do that (Score:4, Informative)
Except, they do. They've released specs for at least Word97, RTF, and PowerPoint's file formats, the OLE container format, and the Excel chart format. The docs were hosted on MSDN for a few years, even. I'm not saying that these docs are perfect or anything (they're far from it), but they're a decent start. I say this as someone who has used the docs to implement popular F/OSS tools that read and write these formats.
http://www.wotsit.org/list.asp?fc=10 [wotsit.org]
http://www.wotsit.org/list.asp?fc=6 [wotsit.org]
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Not neccessary (Score:2, Insightful)
Cost and Mechanics of Certain Free Tools (Score:3, Insightful)
As noted in another post [slashdot.org] about this article, it may be that there is no "format" other than "the code". If so, then the only free tool that is cheap to make is a wrapper around a complete application that just calls only part of that application. If so, making the wrapped t
Opening up OOXML (Score:2, Informative)
The worst proprietary 'hooks' such as 'footnoteLayoutLikeWW8', 'lineWrapLikeWord6' and 'useWord97LineBreakRules', appear now to have been documented - see this link [xmlguru.cz]. This in effect means that some of the quirkier behaviour of old versions of MS Office may now have been made public (difficult to say for sure as the ECMA resolution is behind a passworded site).
Microsoft would make their, and everyone else's, lives a lot easier if they went the whole way and documented the entire depreciated office formats,
No such thing (Score:3, Insightful)
They might not have it... (Score:5, Informative)
I mean, think about it, if you write code to store a document, do you sit down and write the byte-layout of that file? I suppose you could, but it's generally not necessary for the coders. My guess is that MS doesn't even have this stuff lying around. They'd probably have to have someone actually piece it together from the code.
Re:They might not have it... (Score:5, Insightful)
At the company I work for, we usually do sit down and document the byte-layout of that file. When this was neglected, it has invariably come round and bit us in the ass
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Yes, of course. Is there any other industry where this attitude would be accepted?
"Blueprints? No, we just hammer some wood together until we think it won't fall down, or until we run out of nails."
What specifications? (Score:4, Insightful)
Asking Microsoft for the spec will not mean simply taking an existing doc off the shelf and handing it over. It will mean either handing over the code for the old products that read and write those formats or spending person-years of effort combing through that code, constructing a specification, and then, somehow, testing the spec.
I wouldn't hold my breath for either.
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A world standard? Either support, or publish specs (Score:2)
Either support your format, or publish a full specification if you abandon it. (Do neither, and you suck, publicly.)
The world is currently headed towards a rather worrying future in which a staggering number of valued documents and other file resources of many types are destined for demise by corporate aban
It's About Time (Score:2)
Its rare (Score:3, Interesting)
It would also be a superb PR move (even though they don't deserve the publicity for something they should have done on their own long ago): it would reassure clueless CEOs. "See?? We can use closed source software, because once Microsoft doesn't support it, they'll just open it up!!!". It is far from true, but enough would think that way to make it worth it.
So come on MS, do it.
Doesn't exist (Score:2)
A Little Overblown (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:A Little Overblown-NOT NECESSAIRLY (Score:4, Informative)
Cannot agree with you here. Obviously you feel you can continue running Windows 98SE with Office 97 in a virtual partition essentially forever - and in that case, you probably can.
However, the moment you get to Windows XP and recent versions of Office, you hit the dreaded Product Activation bugaboo. Now you're dependent on MS, Adobe, or whomever to continue supporting activation servers as you migrate old software and operating systems to newer virtual platforms. Also EULA's that prevent using software in virtual environments exist. You may well find that running Office 2003 on Windows XP can't be done, legally at least, on the machine that follows your next one. Then where are you?
Parent
Based on previous success (Score:4, Funny)
Based on my previous successes in getting Microsoft to release the source code to the deprecated MS-DOS 4.x (i.e. before the MS-DOS 5.0 complete re-write) under a free / open-source license, I'm confident that Microsoft will be happy to release deprecated file formats under a similar license.
Oh, wait ...
Re:release a convertor and support legacy! (Score:5, Insightful)
we want to move forward, to adopt a standard -give some time to deprecated formats by supporting them till some time (a deadline), and provide conversion tools for free.
Yes, we'd like to have a standard, and one which is readable for a long period of time - which is the point of the whole ODF standard in the first place. The problem with the proprietary formats is that they have every reason to change and a considerable number of reasons to drop support for "deprecated" formats.
I used to work for a medical transcription unit, and we generated over 250K documents annually. It is a non-trivial exercise to convert those documents from one format to another. That doesn't include the loss of formatting which occurs, and there are instances where the formatting is important. This loss occurs even when moving between versions of the same software - just take a Word 97 document and translate it to 2K and then to 2003, and you'll see it.
Your idea is feasible if it's a one-time function. That is, there is a standard format which will be used for a considerable length of time, and you need to translate your older documents into that standard. If you're going to have to do it ever two or three years, it's going to be a non-starter.
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