MS Issues Word Patch To Comply With Court Order

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."

Why patch?

[l2718]

Existing copies of Word were expressly grandfathered in by the ruling -- only the sale of new copies was prohibited. Is the patch intended to be applied against shrink-wrapped copies bought after Jan. 11th?

Re:Open Office is there

[couchslug]

Semi-OT, but a handy way to use different versions of Office on the same PC, and portably on a USB key, is to modify their installation via VMWare ThinApp:

http://www.vmware.com/products/thinapp/ [vmware.com]

I found out about Thinstals/Thinapps/"portable" versions when I accidentally browsed a torrent site where they are popular for various reasons, but the concept works well and it's easier to copy/paste a folder than do a conventional install.

Re:Open Office is there

[samurphy21]

So angry.

Have you ever had a support contract before? At the university where I'm the backup software license officer, we've got a Microsoft Campus Agreement, as well as software site license for SPSS, and multiple other statistical and mathematical software packages. If a widespread problem occurs due to a software fault, such as the calendar issues we were having on the 2003-2007 Office switch, they had someone on the problem and the problem resolved in less than a day.

When a similar glitch occurred in our Evolution users, we had to submit a bug report, then wait for a new version to be released to repository, as we couldn't expect our users to compile from CVS, as the majority of them don't even have a build toolkit.

There's anecdotal evidence for both sides of the argument, but I stand by what's been said.

Re:Open Office is there

[Brett Buck]

Plus, with a MS Office contract, you have a software vendor to fall back to when things go wrong.

          That's not worth the electrons you used to type that sentence. Through work, I have had a "platinum" trouble ticket open with these idiots for about 6 years now. It's a pretty serious issue - documents that become corrupted either while they are being edited, or when opened and then closed. Not trivial stuff - characters just change from one thing to another. They haven't even made a decent effort to resolve it. Their solution to document corruption is to get a correct printed copy, somehow, then scan it in as a TIFF file. This from a senior tech at MS. Not only that, they have consistently been unable to get a simple NDA signed and ITAR certification so that I can give them some of the examples. The sticking point is that they seemingly can't ensure that all the people working it are US citizens. That's not asking a lot for the kind of money that my very large aerospace company pays them in support costs, for this serious an issue.

        Brett