Public Request For Microsoft To Release Deprecated File Formats

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situation to end up with files that cannot be read because the sole vendor with the documentation for the files has withdrawn permission.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."

Yeah but

[Arthur B.]

If you do that, people will never learn and continue to use closed formats. It's too easy to fall for a closed format for your crucial documents and then go whining when the company stops supporting them. Let people pay the price of their mistake, then, then open document formats will pick up steam.

Re:Inaccurate summary

[tonsofpcs]

I think a big part of the issue is that MS has routinely removed full support for their own older file formats from newer apps. I have some Word 2.0 .doc files that the newest program that I can use to read them with all of the advanced settings intact is Word 6.

Re:Inaccurate summary

[faloi]

If you really feel that Microsoft stands to lose so much from releasing specs so that people can potentially even work on their most recent formats, then surely you can appreciate that Microsoft has some responsibility to its customers to make sure they can access their data. Most companies would likely be completely happy with a reader or proprietary file converter that would let them open up older documents. You know...like we could essentially always do when a new version of Office rolled around.

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.

Re:Microsoft cant do that

[adpsimpson]

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---

Its rare

[Shados]

It is rare that I agree with Slashdot articles on such things, but on this, even the most pro-Microsoft zealot cannot really disagree... everybody wins if these specs are released... They're no more supported, don't compete with Microsoft's newer formats, and would -heavily- show all the entities investigating Microsoft's monopoly that they can "do the right thing".

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.

Re:Inaccurate summary

[CastrTroy]

I think that a major problem with many of the old Microsoft formats is that there is no format. They are basically a big memory dump from MS Word, and there's not really a spec of how to actually interpret the information. If the format followed some logical specification, then the OO.o team would have already figured out how to interpret MS Word files.

Conversion shouldn't be that hard

[alexhmit01]

It's not NEARLY as clean as Apple's Applescript solution, but since you can script OLE Components, you should be able to set up a computer to migrate the documents. If they are on a file server, you should be able to set up a machine with whatever is the last version of Office that can read the old files, and have it walk through your document tree, looking for each appropriate document. Then it should be able to load it in Office and save it in a newer format.

That would get all your documents in the latest (Office 2003 or something), then you adapt the script to run on a machine with Office 2007 and do the same thing. Presto-chango, your documents are up to date and safe.

Regarding formatting... if you're talking about documents not updated in 5-10 years, you probably don't care that much. You might want the content (I need to go through old hard drives and rescue any high school and college papers I care about, that are now hitting the 10 year old point), but if you haven't used it in years, and then want to use it, you can take the time to reformat. You're preserving because 1% of those documents might be needed in the future, which makes it worthwhile to bring them forward with an automated solution.

Re:Inaccurate summary

[Ed Avis]

Have you tried the viewers under Wine? If you pay attention to EULAs, then you are not allowed to use the accompanying fonts on non-Microsoft systems, but you are allowed to use the viewer.

Re:Inaccurate summary

[Anonymous Coward]

If you don't like their stuff, don't use it.

Yet another person who doesn't understand about anti-monopoly laws and how they work. When a company is found guilty of monopoly abuse, under competition law they may be required to change their behaviour. This may include (and already has in MS's case) release of interface/file format documentation to allow interoperability.

If *you* don't like it, campaign to abolish the monopoly laws (good luck with that) or move to a country with no such laws. Until then, it's the law and MS must (eventually) comply with it.

As to whether this particular case (Office document formats) merits application of such laws - it looks as if the EU may well be starting the process of determining whether MS should be forced to do so.

Preemptive: And don't bother with the "Stuff the EU, MS should refuse to sell their products there if they do this sort of thing". MS has no choice but to operate in the EU under EU law. If it withdrew the shareholders could sue the directors (since the cost of EU law compliance is much less than the lost profits from withdrawl).

Of course, US competition/monopoly law is very similar to EU law in the relevant areas; it's just apparent not being applied at present after MS was let off with a slap on the wrist last time.

Re:Inaccurate summary

[RyuuzakiTetsuya]

If we're talking consumer products, great! Yes! I have the right not to use them. However, if the document I had been handed wasn't written by my opensource alternative I chose, I'm kind of screwed. Particularly with Microsoft also pretty much in bed with Governments, both the Federal, state and all levels of local municipality, selling them umpteen number of licenses for Office and particularly Word, they do have something of a responsibility to make sure that documents that are created by our own government are readable by the general population. Now, I'm not talking about military secrets here, but if I do a FOIA for some data and I get a word document back, that's really not useful now is it? (Yes, I'll probably get a PDF or actual paper, but it's possible if that's what the document was stored as.)