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."
Feed me! (Score:3, Interesting)
With Open Office, I can read and export every major Microsoft file in and out of OO.
How much more open do you want?
If you want to make applications which use MS file formats, Open Office code is freely available (open source no?) so whats stopping people from developing ?
-SJ53
A better response to this (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:eeehmm (Score:2, Interesting)
The problem is that many goverment institucions give info or documents in propietary formats, as microsoft word
BTW: XML itself is not a format
Open enough... (Score:2, Interesting)
Why shoud I have to sign... (Score:5, Interesting)
What would the agreement do? The standard is either open or not (specification is published or withheld). Does it mean that any program that reads the file in this "open" format is bound by this agreement? I can see someone writting "Here, I sent you a powerpoint presentation and I also had to attach the 3 page agreement that you have to sign and send to Microsoft along with your name, date of birth, social security # and all your bank information. Then you can open and use my file. If you don't Bill Gates will come in person and take your firsborn child. Have a nice day, -Your dearest friend Jojo"
Re:Feed me! (Score:5, Interesting)
Of course, support is always improving, but that's because the
Of course, the real problem, IMO, has little to do with the format itself, but with how often people send
A bit off topic, but also, why the heck won't MS Office import OO.org
Madness (Score:5, Interesting)
So before I would sign, I would need to find a lawyer and pay a lot of money to find out what the implications of signing it would be. I would go through enormous hassle and a lot of money, just so I would have the honor and delight to look at MS' file format specification. But wait, I might go through all that hassle and expense and come up with some answers that I don't like, like finding out that the spec does contain trade secrets, or that I am agreeing to give MS injunctive relief, and if I find those thing out, I will have spent all that money and still I won't be able to look at the spec.
Or I could skip all of this nonsense and ignore whatever they are offering and just use one format which I know is truly open: OASIS. I don't need to sign anything, it doesn't contain any trade secrets, I don't need a lawyer, I don't need to spend any money, I am free to write whatever kind of software I want to based on it, I can do whatever I want with it, I don't have to pay, I don't have to worry about someone getting an injunction to shut me down if he thinks I did something wrong. Wow, when you look at it this way, what's there to even think about in making this decision?
What we really need is an OASIS plug-in for MS Office so that MS Office users can use the OASIS format without any hassles. That would be cool.
Re:A better response to this (Score:5, Interesting)
Why not? The other way is to distribute a bunch of files and have references in the document like "play video 1 now". If you want to distribute a document that describes a series of video clips, embedding those videos in the document itself is seamless.
Just because the OSS community doesn't consider it necessary doesn't mean it's a daft idea. Geeks are completely at home with receiving a bunch of files and playing them as prompted within a document, but the average PHB who can't tell one end of a mouse from the other isn't going to want to mess around like that or to spend more than a microsecond trying to figure out why one of the distributed videos won't play on his system. Geeks will spend hours messing with GSpot and downloading codecs, but PHBs aren't going to fanny around with all that geeky crap.
Plus any boss who fiddles with Linux for a bit isn't going to take long before concluding Linux is retarded because you can't embed video in docs like you can in Word. Sorry, but you have to address "what the users want" and not just "what the geeks want" if Linux is to take over from Microsoft. Windows may be the biggest pile of bugs since a very big pile of bugs but apart from keeling over once in a while it does do what most people want.
Are you open enough? (Score:2, Interesting)
M$, for some people, will never be open enough, but has this affected integration with M$ and Open source programs, if anything I've noticed Open Office is better at back compatibility with old word documents than Word itself.
And As for "They'll never be truely be open until they open source windows". Why should they? Sure some people think all software should be free, but some people like to be rewarded in megabucks for there software, and if its worth it sure. This is, of course, ignoring that windows is not worth its current price even if it isn't worthless.
Re:That's their decision (Score:1, Interesting)
The question is how far this freedom of contract goes. I know that at least here (in Germany) there are limits to what you can ask for. If some company asked me for example to sign me into servitude (gross exaggeration intended) for using their product, I could sign this contract use their product, and still don't worry about becoming unfree.
So the question remains: Should companies be allowd to lock away your Data?
I think they don't.
It's simply a matter of two conflicting Rights, my right to (freely) access my data, and the company's right to lock away their file format.
Thats when laws need to dicide which right is more important for "the society".
In this case most Countries seem to think that free data is more important than free contracts.
Re:eeehmm (Score:1, Interesting)
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb
The
Heck, the license info in the document isn't even terrible... it's almost... open.
Perhaps we should turn it around? (Score:4, Interesting)
1) Make a good XML based ISO standard for textprocessors.
2) Try to convince governments/companies to require their sofware to be compliant with this standard.
3) And this is very important: Demand a very high and continued compatibility with this format to receive the "ISO approved" label. Or else we have another "IGES" debacle on our hands.
Managers and administrators just _love_ ISO standards and will at least frown if we can say: "Well M$ is not even ISO compliant, you will be in trouble in the future if you use that! It's not even compatible with the only existing ISO standard!!". This way M$ will have to coorporate to satisfy the very people that decide about buying their software...
Just a thought. Wouldn't know where to start to make this happen. But perhaps someone else here does
Re:Worked before (Score:3, Interesting)
Methinks "Free" will be impervious for obvious reasons. Not even Microsoft could induce such double think.
Oh, wait.
XML deficiency? (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm not an XML expert and I don't know what Microsoft are trying to do that XML will not accommodate, but, does this not point to a deficiency in the current XML standard? If it does, then wouldn't it be to the benefit of everybody to update the XML standard?
Of course, that does not mean that Microsoft will, or should, use that or any other standard. It is their right to do just what the hell they want. Just like the Open Source people.
Re:Feed me! (Score:5, Interesting)
Now, MS Word has a macro language -- a bastardised dialect of BASIC -- and a document object model {though not quite like the W3C ECMAscript one} that allows the canny programmer access to every feature of a document. And the code to synthesise and analyse SXW files is open source. It ought to be very possible for some third party to write a Microsoft Word plugin to do absolutely seamless import and export of OO.o
If I had a copy of Windows and a copy of Office, I'd be having a go myself. As it is, I got clean three years ago and don't intend to relapse anytime soon. Someone else can have the glory.
They're asking for it... (Score:5, Interesting)
why was he there ? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:A better response to this (Score:3, Interesting)
Not right now, no, but when Trolltech release Qt4 (later this year I think) it will be available under the GPL for Windows too. So we should have KDE4 (including KOffice) for Windows soon afterwards.
Could be interesting. :)
Don't use it (Score:3, Interesting)
When OpenOffice.org stand a real menace, then Microsoft will be pressed to open their format, or to support OO.o own.
OpenOffice.org 2.0 is comming, with database support and a REAL laguage to extend it, Java. Let's see how it stands against Microsoft Office.
Re:Feed me! (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Open enough... (Score:3, Interesting)
In the current environment chasing compatibility with Word formats is not enough. To gain rapid and widespread acceptance you need something that, in the eye of the user, subsumes and significanly improves the capabilities of Word formats. Standard and free are obvious improvements, but you are still left with "subsume", ie: doomed to playing catch-up and fighting FUD.
I don't know the solution, but whatever scheme someone comes up with the "tricky part" is to get the IP laws changed and in such a way that it avoids massive uphevals in the job-market and also increases the rate of innovation (and thus opportunities) in the industry. In other words any practical solution must be a compromise that allows a company to profit from being "first" but also stimulates the industry as a whole. It would also be kinda nice if the industry stimulation was actually useful and interesting work but this is a secondary requirement since it does not put bread on the table.
Since humans first started grunting at each other, exclusive knowlage has equated to exclusive power, those who have it tend to want it kept secret lest it loose it's power. As an example, hands up all slashdotters who would freely publish details of something that they had discovered could, against all common-sense, predict lotto numbers with 80% accuracy. Now keep your hand up if you would publish it before collecting a few bucks in prizes.
Re:Madness (Score:3, Interesting)
I am not up on the proper windows terminology but I believe you can write software which hooks into MS Word and basically constructs a document.
So it should be possible to do this with a client for OASIS or Oo and thus import documents into Word. I am not so sure about going the other way, though.
Re:A better response to this (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Too True (Score:3, Interesting)
extradited for trial by a court run by the UN? Yes. If the US is so confident that its citizens' actions are justifiable, then let them be judged by international law. Refusal is just cowardice.
Oil for Food scandal? ... was the result of inadequately policed sanctions and corruption (allegedly involving US citizens among others). Sure the UN is responsible, in the same way a CEO is. But it is not an "organisation that brought us the ... scandal".
put Libya on the human rights board? This, alas, was the democratic vote of the countries involved. Democracy doesn't always deliver the result you/I want. Consider (depending on your POV) a) Bill Clinton; and b) George W Bush.
stuck with a judge from the other side? So you don't believe judges try to be impartial then?
Edmund.
(Mark me as troll/off-topic if you must.)
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:A better response to this (Score:3, Interesting)
>Word *is* a presentation format.
>As is anything else that isn't plain text.
OK, strictly you're right. By "presentation format" I was thinking of something for making presentations; eg PowerPoint. Word (notice the name "WORD") can be used for lots of things, as you can drive a nail with any heavy object, but I think prinarly for creating printable documents. Movies aren't.
But working in publishing as I do, I don't think of Word as a presentation format, but an authoring environment. Once the author is done with the text, I export it to marked up plain text and use a real DTP app to get ready for print. And often authors embed illustrations in Word; it's possible to extract them but often they're munged into uselessness and I have to get them separately. Embedding videos in Word strikes me as a stunt, perhaps a subterfuge to send porn, and a stupid way to lock up data in a weird format.