We're Open enough, Says Microsoft 660
An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft Australia has come under fire from rival vendors and open-source advocates for keeping its Office document standards proprietary.
Greg Stone, Microsoft's national technology officer for Australia and New Zealand, faced criticism during his presentation at the Australian Unix User Group conference in Canberra yesterday. However, he stood firm on the company's policy of making the XML schemas for its Office 2003 document standard publicly available provided interested parties sign an agreement with the software heavyweight. "Why should I have to sign an agreement?" one audience member demanded to know."
Re:eeehmm (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Agreement (Score:3, Informative)
A legally binding contractual agreement which you must sign in order to read a document and which restricts both your behavior and what you may do with the information contained in the document is in no way similar to a license attached to a document which says "if you wish to make copies of this document and distribute them to others you must satisfy certain conditions, if you cannot meet these conditions then do not redistribute this document".
Similarly signing an employment contract with the company you work for is not "basically the same" as the "All rights reserved." notice printed on a compact disc you buy.
Have a nice day.
Re:Feed me! (Score:5, Informative)
So I thought, time to switch to an open alternative. Bad idea. I couldn't pass edits to the engineer I was working with because every time I'd get back a file with corrupted layout and images about the size of Jupiter.
As far as I can tell, this is because they have to build their
Re:A better response to this (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Agreement (Score:3, Informative)
Re:A better response to this (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Agreement (Score:3, Informative)
Re:A better response to this (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Feed me! So Word can be compatible with itself (Score:2, Informative)
I found it a little funny (well, at 1:50am) that the problems others attribute to OO misinterpreting Word docs are problems I've seen recently, using exactly one installation of Word (2003) on the same machine.
Of course I tried "reveal codes": nothing obvious. I tried exporting to RTF and reimporting (massive file got much much bigger). Ended up cutting and pasting from Word to Notepad (to remove all formatting) and again back to a new Word doc. Problem solved!
Hardly the first time I've had MS documents just become unusable. So I think having public specs and multiple implementations would actually improve MS Office.
Hell, just cleaning the specs up enough to publish would probably pay for itself (from MS' perspective: fewer bugs in MS Office).
Oh, yeah, Word format was gratuitously required.
Re:Feed me! (Score:3, Informative)
> in and out of OO.
You can. In same kind of way that you can build a car with sellotape and cerial packets. You get something that's vaguely what you were after, but it doesn't look right and it's kind of messy.
If you've ever tried it on anything other than a very simple letter, you'll know that it doesn't really work AT ALL. The formatting gets completely messed up, things get resized, the layout goes haywire, some text gets lots etc etc... It really doesn't work.
Why? Because OO don't have access to the file format definition, so they have to guess everything. Unfortunatly, it's quite complicated, so despite lots of hard work, they get it wrong. Often.
Re:In a sense, they're right (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Why shoud I have to sign... (Score:1, Informative)
No, it does not.
Embedding GPL fonts in a document might mean the document has to be open. But I've never met anyone who embeds fonts in documents. Come to that, I've never seen a GPL font, either.
Re:OpenOffice (Score:2, Informative)
My S.O. is a biochemistry researcher, and despite having made sincere efforts to use OO, it has fallen short of meeting her needs. The word processor is fine, actually, but the problems begin with advanced functionality of the spreadsheet, they escalate with integration difficulties between OO apps, and they stop cold with the presentation program being nowhere near a reasonable substitute for powerpoint.
Just one experience, and I'm sure the product has improved significantly since 1.1.2, but there it is. A power user, a true geek, someone who was highly motivated to make it work, couldn't.
OO is a fine word processor, but that's not the whole picture. I've also heard arguments that people don't use many features of the word processor. Well, in a previous career, I was the person who did indeed use pretty much every damn feature of WP5.1, including some quite esoteric things that only legal secretaries probably ever touch. I suspect the claims are made by people who don't know what they are talking about.
On the other hand, OO is pretty complete. But the experience was pretty bad; large datasets linked to complex graphs embedded in a document and a presentation, tended to go to shit; whereas the same tasks were no problem in MS Office. This observation comes from dyed-in-the-wool microsoft-hating geeks who would *really* have liked the results to be different (and who don't have the time or ability to contribute to the OO project to make it better.)
Re:Complete Rubbish. (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Why shoud I have to sign... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Perhaps we should turn it around? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:In a sense, they're right (Score:3, Informative)
They have two court orders(atleast) demanding that they open up there formats and APIs so we are all free to use them.
Re:A better response to this (Score:5, Informative)
Fileextensions:
I think that this standarization might help in persuading governments to choose this new format. Although not an office suite strictly speaking, I wonder about abiword's default file-format... Does/will it use this new standard as the default as well (seems to be a good idea).
Re:Feed me! (Score:2, Informative)
Re:A better response to this (Score:5, Informative)
AFAIK there are talks about Abiword joining in, too.
Anyway, KOffice doing OASIS is great because it's much less bloated than OO.
Re:That's their decision (Score:3, Informative)
I don't think that the problem is really about understanding how these file formats work. The old .doc format has been reverse-engineered successfully (including features that were not documented by Microsoft) and most parts of the new Office XML format are trivial to understand.
The problem is that XML uses schemas for defining how the data is stored in the document (data types, structure, etc.) and for telling the parsers how the documents can be validated and processed. By not allowing free distribution of this information, Microsoft is making it very difficult for other tools to process the Office XML documents. All Office XML documents contain direct references (URIs) to this information. So regardless of whether the developers of the other tools understand the file formats or not, their tools cannot process the XML documents in the "right" way because the schemas are not available freely.
Re:A better response to this (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Feed me! (Score:5, Informative)
OpenOffice.org is not GPL (Score:3, Informative)
"The libraries and component functionality of the OpenOffice.org source code" are LGPL, which allows them to be linked in to proprietary works.
It is also possible to license OO.org under the Sun Industry Standards Source License (SISSL). This allows you to make proprietary, binary only distributions, if you maintain compatibility with with the APIs and XML formats. Microsoft could download the entire source, add an MS-Office GUI and a their own Word importer and make "MS-Office Released" out of it. As long as they don't break any interfaces, that's OK under the SISSL. Why doesn't MS import OO files? Because they don't want to. Perhaps they need some convincing...
Re:Monopoly "competition" (Score:2, Informative)
Re:A better response to this (Score:1, Informative)
Why do you spread it ? (Score:4, Informative)
You should not spread it more. Most of us don't RTFA. Some will get the wrong idea.
Re:A better response to this (Score:4, Informative)
Interestingly enough, that requirement was a good chunck of my Organizational Theory/Behavior class last night. You always have to match the presentation of the message to the medium. A large part of the "barriers in formal communication" section of that lecture was about people with attitudes exactly as what you just expressed. Effective communication can mean just a timely text-based email. Or a 30 minute movie. It depends on who, and why, you are communicating. But awareness of the limitations of various media is always necessary. And sometimes, those limitations actually enhance the message by limiting noise.
Re:Thank you, sir. May I have another? (Score:5, Informative)
You mean with developers not able to support a 7 year old standard, even though it would make the web a much better place, because IE still won't support all of CSS 1 much less CSS 2?
xml wouldn't get any attention if it wasn't "interwebby"
You mean if the W3C team (who were not MS employees) who developed XML hadn't thought ahead to its potential Internet use?
Or do you mean how IE is the only web browser that doesn't support XHTML, so that web developers still have to write tag-soup HTML 4 or break the standard and send XHTML as HTML in order to reach anyone using IE?
this whole XML thing is a passing phase without MS
You mean like the EU standardizing on an XML file format (OpenDocument), O'Riley and Associates publishing using an XML format (DocBook), the W3C moving EVERYTHING to XML including image formats (SVG) (yes MS is a W3C member, but they are far from the only)...
About the only thing I'll give MS credit for is breaking XSLT off from XSLFO, since the latter was taking way too long to standardize, so that now XSLT can be used independently of XSLFO, both in spec and tools. That's a good thing, I won't deny that. But given everything else they've done to hold back and stiffle the development of the "Interwebby", I'd definitely say that MS has been a net-negative on the XML-based-Internet world.
Re:Too True (Score:2, Informative)
Citizens of various countries were kidnapped, in the middle of the night and shipped to Guantanamo Bay, where they were held, without trial, without being charged, without even being permitted to learn what, if any, evidence there was against them. [kansascity.com] Let me suggest that this US policy is more antidemocratic, more contrary to the principles of fundamental justice, and more to be feared than your hypothetical UN extradition strawman, where, at least, the prisoners would have charges laid against them, would be free from the fear of torture, and could expect a reasonably fair trial, where they could actually hear the evidence against them.
Did the UN system allow Saddam, and collaborators in other nations to loot the oil for food funds? Yes. The USA is one of the five permanet members of the UN Security Council. So, why doesn't the USA share some of the responsibility for this scandal?
The CPA took over the administration of the remaining $20 billion in May of 2003. Was Iraqi money looted during Paul Bremer's stewardship? Yes. Billions went missing. He blew through almost all of the Iraqi money in not much longer than a year, with very poor audit controls. Billions were expended with no sign that the expenditure was actually spent on anything that benefitted Iraqis. On a year by year basis a greater portion of the funds can't be accounted for when it was under Paul Bremer's stewardship than when it was under the UN stewardship.
Yes, I know this is "off-topic". It is worth losing some karma to challenge the flawed reasoning of the parent post -- which, moderators, is just as off-topic.
Re:Why do you spread it ? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Why shoud I have to sign... (Score:4, Informative)
The bottom line is that we (consumers, businesses, government) are all harmed when competition is eliminated in the marketplace. MS no longer charges $100 - it's $400 for the pro bundle now (now that the competition is gone) which is just a little less than non-bundled price. Lotus and WordPerfect could not compete with a $100 office suite. They Could compete with a $400 office suite, *if* the market were still competitive.
This is all that need be said (Score:3, Informative)
I need not say anything more.
What about DMCA? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Word is teh sucks. (Score:3, Informative)
If you have an embedded bitmap, save the doc to HTML and you'll get a HTML file and jpegs. In older versions of Word, 97 I think, this seemed to be at the original resolution. Later ones downsampled and made it fairly useless for print. If you don't have 97, or the file won;t open in it, for Word 2000 I found this method: this method [berkeley.edu] that requiues some scripting: