MS Issues Word Patch To Comply With Court Order 179
bennyboy64 writes "iTnews reports that Microsoft has begun offering what appears to be a patch for its popular Word software, allowing it to comply with a recent court ruling which has banned the software giant from selling patent-infringing versions of the word processing product. The workaround should put an end to a long-running dispute between Canadian i4i and Redmond, although it has hinted that the legal battle might yet take another turn."
"Wrist slap"? (Score:5, Insightful)
This is a civil lawsuit. The point is to make the plaintiff whole and cause the infringement to cease. It is not about any sort of punishment.
Re:Open Office is there (Score:2, Insightful)
Because OO isn't compatible enough. If it doesn't look 100% the same, and I mean 100%, it's not good enough.
Copyright? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Why patch? (Score:5, Insightful)
Because they want consistency across all copies of the same version of Office?
Yay. Software patents. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Open Office is there (Score:5, Insightful)
This isn't totally honest.
The transition from Office 97 to Office 2000 caused major headaches because of the lack of proper support for .doc format. People got thru that by recreating many documents, or just doing without them, or waiting until a service pack came out many months later.
Ditto with the transition from Office 2003 to 2007. I've dealt with numerous cases, especially with Powerpoint, where opening and saving in Office 2007 totally fucked up a document. Stuff disappeared, or was rearranged. One case, where the boss got a new laptop 2 days before a conference. His old one died and his new one came with Office 2007. He edited his presentation, saved it as an Office 2003 .ppt and sent it to his assistant to finish. It was totally fubar, but she only edited a few slides in the beginning and didn't see the mess later on. When she sent it to him, her edits looked like crap to him and his earlier edits were gone. It was a nightmare that saw the assistant recreate the entire thing from a printout the day before the conference -- and a total office ban on Office 2007 the day after.
Shit happens, even when exclusively in the MS world. People would redo the documents that didn't translate properly. They'd bitch, but they'd do it. I've seen it time and time again over the last 20+ years. Wordstar (dot commands FTW!) to Wordperfect to Word; Lotus 1-2-3 to Excel; god-knows-what to Visio; and don't even get me started on CAD!
And SuSE, Red Hat, TRW or IBM would be happy to take your money for a support contract.
Re:Open Office is there (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Open Office is there (Score:3, Insightful)
A lot of OSS projects don't sell support contracts; you might be able to hire a key contributor to an OSS project on some kind of consulting basis, but they aren't really on call for support.
There may be third parties good at implementing and possibly troubleshooting some OSS software or components, but if you need some fix implemented due to a bug you're back to being at mercy of the OSS developers unless your third party has developers on staff who can fix OSS products.
None of this is to say the existing commercial market is perfect -- its not, we know that -- but it is a mature market and my experience has been that a lot of commercial applications, including MS, have pretty decent support available when you need it.
Ugh. If it worked, I'd use it. (Score:3, Insightful)
Open office's word processor isn't bad. I've been forced to use the powerpoint replacement (called "Impress") recently and the word "SUCK" doesn't even begin to cover just how badly unworkable it is. In fact, I've renamed it "Repress" because that's a more accurate description of what it does.
I'm not trying to do fancy transitions or stupid animations either. Just basic slideware for hour or 90 minute long technical presentations. It can't even do a fsking "replace template" or "master" properly. It just sucks. Totally and completely sucks.
By the way, in case I wasn't clear -- I don't care for it.
When it meets even close to parity, I'll jump all over it. Until then, I'll pay my Microsoft tax (or switch and pay my Apple tax).
Re:"Wrist slap"? (Score:2, Insightful)
I would like to know where my damages are. How can Microsoft sell a product with a feature, lose an intellectual property case, then take the feature out of my copy by way of "patch". Didn't I pay for that feature? Microsoft has done this before, and I didn't get a refund. How can they keep doing this without eventually even acknowledging that they are removing features from *my* product, not *their* product?
Re:Open Office is there (Score:2, Insightful)
Then why does every new version of Microsoft Office look 100% different than the previous version?
I use OO.o with business documents; works fine. (Score:4, Insightful)
I do exactly that with business documents every day. I open them in OpenOffice.org, print them from OO.o, and if something doesn't import/open correctly due to mistranslation, I make do with what I've got just like millions of users have done across decades of opening important documents in various versions of Microsoft office programs. Microsoft's office programs don't always open and work flawlessly across operating systems or even versions of Microsoft Office. Any talk about "guarantees" and 100% perfect conversion, that's the utopia.
Re:Open Office is there (Score:2, Insightful)
I should have clarified; what I meant was that if the document doesn't look and behave exactly the same when opened in OO (including macros, VBA etc etc which are in use everyday at every corporation) then it's not an option.
Re:Open Office is there (Score:4, Insightful)
There is even _less_ guarantee that MS format documents will be correctly displayed or formatted by _any_ tool. Microsoft has repeatedly been shown, in court, to publish documentation of their formats so bad that it is useless to other developers. And the changes between MS Word versions are frequently terribly mishandled by even the best of Microsoft's tools.
In general, the few documents that do not display correctly in OpenOffice which I've not encountered were prey to time-wasting layout micromanagers, who specified every single character's position for esthetic effects that have nothing to do with actual content, and the mishandling is a good indicator that the document itself is written by a paper-work pusher collecting their management salary for picking fonts.
And have you ever _tried_ to get MS Office support, as opposed to commercial OpenOffice support or even open source support for OpenOffice? Go ahead: try to get help with Hebrew printing, or Microsoft mishandling of Unicode.
Re:Open Office is there (Score:3, Insightful)
Outlook, group policy, VBA macros, Active Directory deployment, Sharepoint integration, widespread compatibility with third party software.
I'm not a Microsoft troll. But you asked and that is the answer.
-Graham
Re:Open Office is there (Score:2, Insightful)
Business users have a lot of finely detailed and rigidly laid out documents, sometimes with proprietary macro or VBA coding in them. This stuff would be a huge pain to translate to an open standard, and there's no guarantee that OOo will display them faithfully and with fidelity.
I take it you haven't tried to upgrade to the most recent version. Good luck with that proprietary macro support and having things not lose fidelity and work the same.
You don't get this to the same extent with OSS, which is why business is often slow to adopt it.
The majority of what prevents adoption of OO is FUD, plain & simple. Software vendor contract with MS Office? Are you kidding? Most businesses don't HAVE a vendor contract they just have a pack of licenses, and any issues with it working your "support" is to report a bug on their forums.
People are afraid to move to something new, and they've "heard" of issues with other products. Sure, I agree that OOo isn't totally acceptable for many companies, but many companies simply have themselves locked into a proprietary solution and are going to have issues no matter WHAT they try to migrate to. The better long-term approach is to free your company from such things, but managers rarely are able to "justify" real (or imaginary) migration issues.
Re:The appeal decision is worth reading in full (Score:5, Insightful)
I imagine Microsoft has no problem with being "forced" to remove support for custom XML elements now that the enterprise threat posed by OpenOffice has waned. Others [blogspot.com] saw this coming and warned that Microsoft's OOXML was a marketing gimmick pretty much from the start.
ODF vs OOXML has little or nothing to do with this lawsuit. The custom XML capabilities of MS Office application that were the object of this lawsuit are not part of the OOXML file format specification; by definition it could not be a custom schema if it's defined in the spec.
Re:I use OO.o with business documents; works fine. (Score:3, Insightful)
This has been a complaint since even before WYSIWYG. In the olden days when I first started with computers, if you wanted that you used TeX or Postcript (which PDF is a descendant of) or some other typesetting format. Word processors alone could never, and were never designed to allow absolute 100% rendering every time. Differences in operating systems, software versions, printers and other rendering/printing devices are so substantial that it would be impossible. Even with modern printer abstraction layers, you just can't deliver that assurance. WYSIWYG has always been a certain percentage bullshit, and the kind of bastardized monster that the Microsoft doc format (or rather formats, the whole thing even up to and included OOXML is just a mishmash) is no different.
Re:Open Office is there (Score:4, Insightful)
We have a very unique structure at the university. Our clients are our 4000+ staff, faculty and students, all of whom have standalone laptop systems, not part of our managed systems. We are currently looking into putting our own ubuntu repository online for custom packages and updated revisions, but the headaches of this breaking mainline repository updates is daunting.
The bulk of the systems (again, 4000+ laptops) never pass through our hands, so we can't configure them ourselves, and would have to provide documentation on this to the masses, 80% of whom would have no issues, and 20% of whom we'd end up having to handhold through the process of adding custom respositories, 5% of whom we'd have to see in person.
We have a not insignificant amount of users, primarily library staff and long time faculty who are on the far side of 60 years old, and are resentful and afraid of the picture box with the typewriter.
All in all, not insurmountable, just daunting, and it will be tackled some day, but the 2008-2009 school year marked the first year of official adoption by the faculty of OSS packages. We're still hammering out the wrinkles.
And no, my official title is "Technology Services Consultant", but I act as backup to the software license officer when he is otherwise indisposed.
Re:The appeal decision is worth reading in full (Score:4, Insightful)
I won't argue that i4i doesn't legally "deserve" $290 million because of what MS did or that MS shouldn't be "punished" by that amount; the courts are supposed (in an ideal world at least) to determine the proper amount based on patent and contract law.
But I'm assuming that you are using the term "real damages" in the non-legal sense of what i4i actually suffered (in the sense of what they would have that that don't have now, had MS not used their patent). I highly doubt that "real damages" in that sense have been "substantially underestimated". Small companies rarely sell $290 million of any kind of software, patent or not.
Re:Open Office is there (Score:3, Insightful)
Because OO isn't compatible enough. If it doesn't look 100% the same, and I mean 100%, it's not good enough.
It's not that it isn't 100% the same. Its that OO tried so hard to make a clone of MS Office and only got it about 80% the same. If you're going to be a blatant rip-off of an existing product, at least try to implement the same features in the same manner. Nothing like having almost identical menus, except the shortcut keys are slightly different.
Re:Open Office is there (Score:2, Insightful)
People don't like when a new version of Microsoft Office looks different. People at my company, my wife's company, and many neighbors refused to use 2007 for a long time and even removed it on new computers to install an older version.
But when you finally learn the new version of Microsoft office you know you'll be able to use that learning at the office and friends' houses and other places. If you take the time to learn OO, there's a good chance you won't see it anywhere except your house.
When my wife had to learn to mail-merge on MS 2007 a year ago she just had to learn the sequence of menu/keys, but she knew the general process. I got her a new computer a couple of months ago and put OO on it. When she tried to mail-merge our Christmas cards she got very frustrated:
"I have an excel file. Why do I need to create a database from it?" (not a big deal once you learn, but I agree - why have to?)
"How do you remove duplicate rows in excel" (it's ugly if the help I found is correct, so she did it manually)
"Why is it printing 2 addresses on one envelope then none on the next?" (??? envelope size was right, everything else looked right. we started over and same thing. she printed them 1 at a time)
My kids and I have used OO for years on documents an simple spreadsheets without problems. This was my wife's first encounter with OO and probably her last.