Microsoft Wins Industry Standard Status for Office 281
everphilski writes "The International Herald-Tribune reports that Microsoft has won industry standard status for Office. EMCA International, a group of hardware and software makers based in Geneva, approved the MS file formats with only one dissenting vote - IBM. IBM backs the OpenDocument standard, which was approved by the ISO in May of this year." From the article: "Bob Sutor, IBM's vice president for open source and standards, called Microsoft's Office formats technically unwieldy - requiring software developers to absorb 6,000 pages of specifications, compared with 700 pages for OpenDocument. 'The practical effect is the only people who are going to be in a position to implement Microsoft's specifications are Microsoft,' Sutor said."
EMCA (Score:3, Interesting)
Someone must be confused... (Score:3, Interesting)
Malice, or an incompetent journalist?
Two more articles on the issue... (Score:2, Interesting)
...that people might find interesting:
Re:Just to set things straight... (Score:3, Interesting)
Reverse compiling Microsoft's software to figure out how they implemented the spec, on the other hand, is a whole other kettle of fish. So don't do it. Get the specs directly from ECMA and start implementing.
Re:Bias (Score:2, Interesting)
mandelbr0t
I sincerely hope this does not gain wide adoption (Score:2, Interesting)
If you guessed "Microsoft", you may advance to the head of the class."
http://www.robweir.com/blog/2006/10/leap-back.htm
Tips on writing a "standard":
http://www.robweir.com/blog/index.html [robweir.com]
It's The License That Kills It (Score:4, Interesting)
No right to create modifications or derivatives of this Specification is granted herein.
There is a separate patent license available to parties interested in implementing software programs that can read and write files that conform to the Specification. This patent license is available at this location: http://www.microsoft.com/mscorp/ip/format/xmlpate
The link with the actual license to READ and WRITE a file to their specifications is dead. This one works though, http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/xps/xpspatentlic.ms
Some handy excerpts: "Necessary Claims" do not include any claims: (i) that would require a payment of royalties by Microsoft to unaffiliated third parties; (ii) covering any Enabling Technologies that may be necessary to make or use any product incorporating a Licensed Implementation,....
This says to me that they have not indemnified developers from patent time-bombs for the functions one step beyond their proposed standard or other patent time-bombs laid by lesser-known Patent IP firms. Maybe someone with more coding skills can explain if it would be possible to implement a standard without so-called "Enabling Technologies"?
(iii) covering the reading or writing of documents other than XPS Documents, or rendering of XPS Documents in a manner that is different than the rendering allowed by the XML Paper Specification. "Enabling Technologies" means technologies that may be necessary to make or use any product or portion of a product that complies with the XML Paper Specification, but are not expressly set forth"
To me this says Microsoft can come after you if you do something they didn't think of.
I don't see how this benefits any developer outside of a select few.
Re:6,000 pages (in what format?) (Score:3, Interesting)
The Power of ODF (Score:4, Interesting)
I implemented a photo directory for my church congregation. Since it would need to be easily updated I kept the information in a CSV spreadsheet, including names, addresses, and the name of the photo file. I looked at doing a mail merge with either OOo or Word and it didn't look like I could get what I really wanted with either. So I made a sample doc in OOo Writer and saved it. I then renamed it to a
I'll admit that you would have to be a programmer to do something like that, but it was really easy and required no documentation or specialized knowledge. That is the power of the ODF. I'm guessing the same isn't possible with the MS format.
Re:6,000 pages (in what format?) (Score:2, Interesting)
Have you considered perhaps that MS's Office format is larger simply because it may be more technically advanced, more descriptive and more feature complete than OpenDocument? Also that perhaps its size is due to the benefits of a collabarative design process rather than a comittee based process? Did you also consider that the document may have benefited from the fact that it has already been implemented by MS themselves?
All worthwhile assumptions, but I doubt the average slashdotter paused for a second due to built up anti-MS propaganda squeezing out all reaonable thought process.
There is considerable evidence however that committees for single industry wide open standards hold back technical progress. This is fine if the standard is simple and fexible enough not to warrant much change (such as comms protocols for example), but for anything else can be deadly (CSS for example).
To my knowledge it has never been proved that MS withheld information about an API for anti-competitive purposes. Stop propagating these myths. Every software company is guilty of questionable documentation, however in my experience MS often has excellent documentation - if you open your eyes and go looking for it.
When will slashdotters realise that one industry standard for something as variable as a word processing format holds back innovation? This is the age of XML - we should embrace multiple formats, implementations and the conversion between each, rather than stifling progress.
Re:6,000 pages (in what format?) (Score:3, Interesting)
Sutor, IBM's dissenting voter says: "The practical effect is the only people who are going to be in a position to implement Microsoft's specifications are Microsoft."
This should make it clear that a spec is not necessarily enough for a 'standard'.
I suggest that standards committees (ISO, ECMA, etc.) require not just human-readable documentation for a new standard, but also BSD-licensed code that implements that standard, i.e., a 'reference implementation'. Otherwise, there is simply too much room for interpretation, and standardization is lost.
Re:6,000 pages (in what format?) (Score:1, Interesting)
Of course, you can ask why MS has to reinvent the wheel when they could just use what's aready out there, right? So let's say you're about to implement MathML in Word and find that MathML doesn't support a feature that Word has, like change tracking. Do you extend MathML and to support your feature and risk being called nasty names for making your implementation incompatible with anyone else's? Do you not implement the feature, thus not providing full fidelity with existing documents? Or do you design a language that is coherent with the rest of your product and supports all of the features you need?
Now what about SVG? It's great for making things like interactive maps, but it is incapable of describing text other than on a straight line. A word processor should be able to fit text inside a shape or wrap it around a shape, but SVG provides no way to specify either of those. I don't know how OOo implements those features, but if it does have them, it can't possibly be doing so with standard SVG.
dom