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Massachusetts Explains Legal Concerns for Open Documents 321

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the battle-lines-are-being-drawn-and-quartered dept.
Tontoman writes "ZDNet is running a story that sheds new light on the decision by Massachusetts to switch to open formats for the commonwealth's official documents. This issue has previously been discussed on Slashdot, first The Massachusetts Office Party and then Microsoft Lashes out at Massachusetts IT Decision . From the article: 'Eric Kriss, Secretary of Administration & Finance for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, told CRN on Friday that Massachusetts had concerns about the openness of Microsoft XML schemas as well as with potential patent issues that could arise in the future.' The article also quotes a Microsoft executive on further reason that Microsoft's upcoming Office 12 will not support OpenDocument."
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Massachusetts Explains Legal Concerns for Open Documents More

Massachusetts Explains Legal Concerns for Open Documents

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  • ms (Score:4, Insightful)

    by ToAsTeDd ( 891717 ) on Tuesday September 06, 2005 @05:04AM (#13488442)
    ms office must support openoffice documents... it's just more reason not to use it

    • Re:ms (Score:4, Insightful)

      by SoloFlyer2 ( 872483 ) on Tuesday September 06, 2005 @05:15AM (#13488476)
      It is not in Microsofts best interests to support interoperability, and they will do anything they can do justify it using FUD

      • Correction: (Score:5, Insightful)

        by msauve ( 701917 ) on Tuesday September 06, 2005 @07:20AM (#13488901)
        It not not currently in Microsoft's best interest to support OpenDocument. If they loose marketshare to alternatives which do, it will at some point be in their best interest to do so.

        It behooves those who desire unrestricted interchange of information to help make proper support of OpenDocument become of interest to MS.

        This move by MA is a step in the right direction, away from proprietary formats.

      • Re:ms (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Decker-Mage ( 782424 ) <brian.bartlett@gmail.com> on Tuesday September 06, 2005 @09:03AM (#13489456)
        Which is a curious postition given that MS has moved in so many other areas to support interoperability. That they don't in the Office arena tells us exactly where the cash cow is for them. Personally I think they are shooting themselves in the groin and I will be telling them so. Will they listen? I doubt it.

    • Re:ms (Score:5, Insightful)

      by trezor ( 555230 ) on Tuesday September 06, 2005 @05:19AM (#13488491) Homepage

      ms office must support openoffice documents... it's just more reason not to use it

      Just like there's "no reason" for MS not to support webstandards. But we all know how that story...

      • Re:ms (Score:5, Insightful)

        by jurt1235 ( 834677 ) on Tuesday September 06, 2005 @05:28AM (#13488520) Homepage
        Firefox part II?

        And compared to the firefox story, which just hurts freely given away IE, and people still use MS windows as platform, so not costing any profits, and uptake of 10% in OpenOffice would really hurt the bottomline of MS. Not that they will lose money because of it, but the profitability goes down, maybe even pricing pressure to keep people away from this free OpenOffice.

        Hey, how about a page size add in a newspaper for www.downloadOpenOffice.org (already exists, and is someones attempt to earn some cash, to bad)

        • OO vs. Firefox platform lock-in (Score:5, Insightful)

          by Alwin Henseler ( 640539 ) on Tuesday September 06, 2005 @06:51AM (#13488789)
          And compared to the firefox story, which just hurts freely given away IE, and people still use MS windows as platform, so not costing any profits, and uptake of 10% in OpenOffice would really hurt the bottomline of MS.

          Moderators, parent clearly deserves some 'insightful' points here, since known cash cows for MS are Windows, and Office. But:

          If users ditch Office for a free alternative, clearly MS's bottomline gets hurt. Not so with Firefox? I disagree: IE is a way to lock users into the Windows platform. If you need IE, you need Windows (in general). If you need Firefox, you need Windows OR (enter you favorite Firefox-capable OS here). So ditching IE in favor of Firefox, is one way to reduce your dependence on the Windows platform. And a good reason for MS to give away IE for free, I think.

          So increased use of OO may eat directly into MS's bottomline, but increased use of Firefox makes it easier for MS's bottomline to get eaten into.

          My view is that MS not supporting open standards is simply to make it harder to switch platforms, to increase the cost & effort of a switch. Another example: why doesn't MS itself provide support for Linux ext2 or BSD filesystems? It's technically feasible (others have done it), many dual-booting folks would like it, and there aren't any licensing problems that I can see (as long as MS would write their own, or build on BSD-licensed code). So why? Simple: without it, dual-booting folks have to look themselves for ext2/BSD filesystem drivers for Windows. More hassle, higher cost of moving to Linux/*BSD.

          MS says it cares about interoperability, but it's actions often say otherwise. Not supporting OO document format in Office is just another example of that. Anyway, I think managers that decide between MS Office or OO, Firefox or IE, Windows, Linux or Mac OSX on company desktops, matter more here than home users.

    • Format converter (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Peer Janssen ( 891608 ) on Tuesday September 06, 2005 @06:03AM (#13488627)
      Isn't there anybody who could program an appropriate converter to be loaded into MS Word?

      I mean, if people can program an import filter, why not an export filter?

      There certainly people who know how to do it.

      Even if somebody has to sign an NDA agreement -- would it disallow to make such a filter?

      I'm sure this would be more productive than waiting for MS to do it.

      • Re:Format converter (Score:5, Interesting)

        by ozmanjusri ( 601766 ) <aussie_bob@nOspAm.hotmail.com> on Tuesday September 06, 2005 @06:12AM (#13488658) Journal
        Isn't there anybody who could program an appropriate converter to be loaded into MS Word?

        You're right, and this could be a fatal error in Microsoft's strategy. If there is a freely available converter which allows Word to import and export OOo files, any attempt on their part to make their own format incompatible could backfire and make OOo the default file exchange format.

        I've been looking at both OOo and MS XML formats, and it doesn't look like it would be too hard to impliment converters as add-ins for Office formats.

        • Re:Format converter (Score:3, Insightful)

          by Anonymous Coward
          Start a sourceforge project? I'm pretty sure a few people would thank you.

      • Re:Format converter (Score:5, Insightful)

        by ajs318 ( 655362 ) <sd_resp2NO@SPAMearthshod.co.uk> on Tuesday September 06, 2005 @07:25AM (#13488921)
        OpenDocument compatibility is coming to Office anyway, and whether Microsoft likes it or not. Office has an embedded programming language, a bastardised dialect of BASIC, which includes a document object model. So, it ought to be entirely possible to write a series of Office macros which turned an Office document into an OpenDocument document -- and maybe back as well.

        Now the only thing keeping Office popular is the lack of interoperability with anything else. Lack of interoperability is usually considered to be a bad thing -- name me one electricity company that sells 48 volts DC. We have already seen protectionism fail when countries did things like adopting different TV standards from their neighbours effectively to prevent imports of cheap tellies {setmakers just went multi-standard, and SCART connectors with RGB input eventually became the norm}.

        These realities do not appear to have hit the computer market yet ..... or at least, not hard enough. Probably the ones who are still in awe of computers don't even realise what ought to be possible. I've been connecting stuff together all my life -- before computers, it was record players, tape recorders and radio sets, recording signals from the wireless and amplifying them through the record player's speaker. My first VCR, with its separate audio and video sockets opened up exciting new possibilities in connectivity {4 hour long recordings of radio broadcasts from pop festivals! Complete with teletext-style graphics from the Model B, which were initially only there to keep the muting off but evolved into a kind of artform in their own right}. Every computer I have ever owned has had something unusual plugged into it.

        But I don't think I represent most of the population. I think most people don't expect things to be connected together and just work like that; they're still so taken in by the fact that they just press the keys and the letters come up on the screen, and later pop out of the printer, that they don't think past that. That ought to change in the future; but it will depend more on the fact of clue filtering slowly through to the population than anything any major player does {unless that something is to cause sudden and large-scale data loss}.

        If the conversion suite was released as quasi-Open Source software {as open as anything running on a closed platform can be}, then the only thing Microsoft could do about that is try and prove they own a patent on converting documents between Office and OpenDocument standards; but then they would expose themselves to the patent being struck down on the grounds that the invention had not been worked {which is still valid in some jurisdictions IMMSMC}. Not to mention that it would constitute an admission that Microsoft already had the technology to perform the conversion {otherwise the patent would be a mere work of science fiction, therefore null and void by default}. This would have the effect of casting doubt on other things Microsoft are fond of saying.

        Once a mechanism was in place for converting documents between OpenDocument and Office formats, a business would then need only one PC running Office -- and then only for as long as they have any Office files to convert to OpenDocument. Under well-established doctrines, they would even be within their rights to sell that machine to another business when it was finished with.

        At the moment, I have good reasons not to be having a go at this. When those reasons change, if there is not already a functioning translator, I will definitely set up a Windows machine of my own and give it a crack.

        • Re:Format converter (Score:3, Insightful)

          by radtea ( 464814 )
          Now the only thing keeping Office popular is the lack of interoperability with anything else.

          And MS knows this. Gates famous internet memo from '95 highlighted the fact that in a few hours of surfing he didn't find any Microsoft document formats out there, except a few PPT files. That really upset him, because he knows that closed file formats are the drug that MS is pushing.

          MS is fighting a rear-guard action on this, and in the end they will lose, because if OOo doesn't win, some other open format will.

    • Re:ms (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Oddly enough, when Office was first released, I used it quite often to convert docs from one filetype to another.

      The first versions of Office were quite adept at reading and writing almost every other format out there: Wordperfect, AMI, even old WordStar files from CP/M. While they were trying to penetrate a market that had a lot of competition, they were very compatible with everyone.

      I guess the rules are different now that they have achieved market dominance. Now they are far more interested in leveraging

  • MS reply (Score:5, Interesting)

    by DLX ( 867128 ) on Tuesday September 06, 2005 @05:05AM (#13488444)
    Microsoft said that Massachusetts decision is wrong because open document formats do not allow embedded video or audio in the document. I wonder, how many of us have ever used embedded audio/video feature in the .doc?!

    • Re:MS reply (Score:2, Informative)

      by SoloFlyer2 ( 872483 )
      Yes, but this statement was also proved to be nothing more than Microsoft FUD
    • Video, audio, javascript etc.. And just extend as you go.

      • Re:OO does support much more (Score:5, Insightful)

        by jez9999 ( 618189 ) on Tuesday September 06, 2005 @05:50AM (#13488583) Homepage Journal
        Well, that's unfortunate.

        I don't just think embedding of video/audio in documents isn't necessary, I think it's very stupid. A document should be able to be printed out!!! Clearly, these things cannot be printed out and held on paper; ergo they do not belong in documents. The same goes for anything else that cannot be printed out and held on paper.

        If you want those things, put them in some other computer format, but don't warp the meaning of 'document' to mean 'anything you can hold and represent on a computer, mushed into one file', because that's just silly.
        • I agree on your view of text documents. However, there is also a standard for presentation documents (ie PowerPoint). These have a dual target - bigscreen projectors and paper. For the first target, video really helps. I'm not sure what is included in the standard and not, but I really see the point in being able to include a piece of video in my keynote...
        • A document should be able to be printed out!!!

          One thing we've learned from (HT|SG|X)ML is to separate content from presentation. While OpenDoc does focus largely on presentation, there is room for more than one medium.

          An electronic version of a document may use a color picture, whereas the print version may be constrained to black and white for cost reasons. In the future, the same constraint may apply to videos: the OLED paper costs ten times as much as the pulp paper.

    • Re:MS reply (Score:4, Interesting)

      by diegocgteleline.es ( 653730 ) on Tuesday September 06, 2005 @05:23AM (#13488505)
      Well, not just videos and audio. They allow them to put "binary data" inside the document.

      And that binary data can have whatever data format they want, including a closed and obscure and undocummented format (say, a "new feature" in future office versions which happens to embbed binary data with a closed format). Which is against the whole point of having an open format.

    • Re:MS reply (Score:2, Interesting)

      by VJ42 ( 860241 )
      If MS is really concerned about that issue they could always release the .doc document specification, I'm sure many other people would pick it up and develop readers\writers for it, like with pdf. Would that have Mass. continue to use MS Office as .doc woul be open?
    • The folks at Redmond must have special paper [wikipedia.org] that lets you print video and audio.

    • Re:MS reply (Score:5, Insightful)

      by DrXym ( 126579 ) on Tuesday September 06, 2005 @05:40AM (#13488552)
      I don't who said it but it is wrong. All I have to do to embed a video, sound, OLE object, Java applet or various other things is launch OO, and choose Insert | Object | from the menu. It's that simple. You can even embed a MS Word document inside OO if you felt like it.


      Naturally the OLE object's content is encoded, but the document format copes with it just fine.

      • OpenOffice format != OpenDoc format. The latter is a lot more restrictive in terms of what you can do with it (which is *good* if you want it to be a standard).

        So Microsoft is right in this case - their format would do stuff that OpenDoc won't. Shame that the rest of their speech is unadulterated ***FLUSH***

        • Re:That's not the proposed format (Score:5, Informative)

          by DrXym ( 126579 ) on Tuesday September 06, 2005 @06:23AM (#13488685)
          OLE objects are supported in the urn:oasis:names:tc:opendocument:xmlns:drawing:1.0 namespace. This can be seen by saving a document containing an OLE object and opening up the content.xml file.


          The tag will be represented as something like this:


          <draw:object-ole xlink:href="./Object 1" xlink:type="simple" xlink:show="embed" xlink:actuate="onLoad"/>


          The OLE object's content would be in that "Object 1". This is obviously not XML, doesn't have to be. When OO starts, it instantiates the CLSID specified in the Object 1 file and streams its data into it via IStream or IStorage. Thus any OLE object is supported by the spec and by OO.


          The object-ole tag is documented on page 300 of the OpenDocument 1.0 spec. Other mechanisms for embedding objects are also documented.


          So it is supported by the Open Document spec.

          • As I recall (it's been many years since I went near OLE), every OLE object is required to also provide a bitmap representation of the content, which allows it to be viewed (but not edited) on platforms which do not contain the object used to create them.

            If Open Document supports this, then it should be possible to view documents containing OLE objects on non-Windows platforms.

            • When you embed an OLEl object, it also puts this tag in:

              <draw:image xlink:href="./ObjectReplacements/Object 1" xlink:type="simple" xlink:show="embed" xlink:actuate="onLoad"/>

              So in this case the preview image (for representing the object when it's not active) lives under "./ObjectReplacements/Object 1" in the zipped up .odt file. The problem with it is that the OLE object is also responsible for supplying this image. I don't know what format OLE uses but it may well be WMF or something like that. S

        • do you have some more detailed information regarding this ?

          pre-2.0 builds of oo.org use opendocument (ods, ods etc) as a default format and these are able to contain all mentioned media.

          also, od was based on oo.org file format, several oo.org participants were on oasis committee - i somehow doubt they would have developed a format that would be seriously limited.

          as mentioned in this thread and here :
          http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/office/faq.ph p [oasis-open.org]
          http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDocument [wikipedia.org]
          od uses existing
    • Is Microsoft admiting that OpenOffice2 is as good as MSOffice12, exept for the ability to embend audio and video on the documents?

      If so, that's great... because now the OpenOffice guys can concentrate their efforts on performance and stability, instead of trying to catch up with MSOffice implementing features I don't need. Not to mention a native MacOSX port!

      I'm not saying that OpenOffice is near as bloated as MSOffice, but it would be nice to see it more lean and clean, and to be able to run it on some old
      • Uoops, I inserted the "MacOSX port" on the wrong paragraph!!! I consider it a must for OpenOffice! Not the other way round, as it sounds now. -->hits himself in the head, to learn how to use the preview button--
    • Alan Yates, Microsoft's general manager of Information Worker business strategy, criticised the Massachusetts proposal, saying it was "confusing".

      If a statement, "we don't want to use something that locks us in and presents possible legal problems," is confusing, I'd say Microsoft has reached a state of clueless nirvana.

  • Possible reason to not support "save as" OO (Score:4, Insightful)

    by banana fiend ( 611664 ) on Tuesday September 06, 2005 @05:15AM (#13488478)
    Wait - I can't think of a reason not to support a "save as Open-Office format".

    Surely, having create a document, you can save it out as an Open-Office document? Why are they talking about backwards compatibility - this is like save as text.

    Just like save as text it does not support embedded video and Multimedia, and just like text, it's available to be read by anybody who has access to the standards.

    • Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Tuesday September 06, 2005 @05:24AM (#13488507)
      Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • non-cynical reason: because the MS Office format contains features that the open format doesn't. Therefore it may not render correctly, and it may not survive a round-trip from MSO-OO-MSO.

      cynical reason: file format incompatibility is what keeps customers on the upgrade treadmill.

    • Re:Possible reason to not support "save as" OO (Score:5, Insightful)

      by oneandoneis2 ( 777721 ) * on Tuesday September 06, 2005 @06:56AM (#13488816) Homepage
      There's a VERY good reason for MS to not support "Save as OO" as an option.

      Imagine you're a typical corporation: You have thousands of documents, they're all in .doc format. So everybody has MS Office installed.

      You hear about a free alternative, but it doesn't support the .doc format reliably enough to switch - your thousands of documents would have to be manually edited, one at a time. This is a big expense that stops OO being free. Or you'd have to keep MS Office available, in which case you might just as well not switch.

      In other words: Nobody with more than a few .doc documents can switch from Ms Office to OpenOffice. Result: $$$ for MS

      Now imagine MS Word could save reliably in OO's format. And it can obviously open .doc files reliably.

      A company could now run a batch job that opens .doc files and saves them in OO format. MS Word converts all the company documents into OO format. Company then throws away MS Word, and happily uses OO.

      Result: MS looses customers.

      MS will fight to the last to stop people being able to do this. If this function were implemented, most people would not need MS Office any more. And if you don't need Office, you don't really need Windows. And if you don't need either of those, why do you need MS?

      • Re:Possible reason to not support "save as" OO (Score:4, Informative)

        by mrchaotica ( 681592 ) on Tuesday September 06, 2005 @08:58AM (#13489419)
        You hear about a free alternative, but it doesn't support the .doc format reliably enough to switch - your thousands of documents would have to be manually edited, one at a time.
        [snip]
        Now imagine MS Word could save reliably in OO's format. And it can obviously open .doc files reliably.
        There's one problem with your theory: you've got it backwards. OpenOffice is the program that can open .doc files reliably, and Word is more likely to screw something up (especially if you created the .doc with a different version!

        If a company wants to convert their Word documents to OpenDocument format, then the easiest way to do it is actually to use OpenOffice!

      • Re:Possible reason to not support "save as" OO (Score:5, Informative)

        by PetoskeyGuy ( 648788 ) on Tuesday September 06, 2005 @09:49AM (#13489785)
        In other words: Nobody with more than a few .doc documents can switch from Ms Office to OpenOffice. Result: $$$ for MS

        Now imagine MS Word could save reliably in OO's format. And it can obviously open .doc files reliably.

        A company could now run a batch job that opens .doc files and saves them in OO format. MS Word converts all the company documents into OO format. Company then throws away MS Word, and happily uses OO.

        Batch Converting MS Word Documents in OpenOffice.org
        1. Open File / AutoPilot / Document Convertor
        2. Select Microsoft Office
        3. Choose any combination of
            [X] Word
            [X] Excel
            [X] PowerPoint formats.
        4. Click Next
        5. Enter the proper locations for where to read files in and where to dump them out...
        6. Click Convert!

        Watch (and wait) as hundreds of MS Office Documents are quickly and easily converted to OO formats.

        You will lose some formating and I think all macro information, but those can be cleaned up later.

        Result: MS looses customers.
        When you have 90+% of the market that can't really be avoided.

  • It wasn't a problem before (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 06, 2005 @05:17AM (#13488483)
    The article also quotes a Microsoft executive on further reason that Microsoft's upcoming Office 12 will not support OpenDocument.

    Well, sort of. From the article:

    Yates reiterated the Microsoft does not intend to natively support the OpenDocument format, which he said was very specific to the OpenOffice.org 2.0 open source productivity suite.

    I don't recall Microsoft having any problems supporting say, WordPerfect documents, which after all were "very specific to the [WordPerfect] productivity suite." Of course, that was back when Microsoft were chasing WP down. It just wouldn't do to support a format that might help people not to use Office now would it?
    • And the microsoft formats are very specific to their applications, and yet openoffice supports them..
      Also, microsoft claims that compatibility with older office applications are important, and yet their xml format is not compatible with versions prior to 2003 and their binary format has many incompatibilities between versions both forwards and backwards.

    • Re:It wasn't a problem before (Score:5, Informative)

      by richlv ( 778496 ) on Tuesday September 06, 2005 @06:51AM (#13488790)
      an interesting and required read for everybody interested in open formats :
      http://www.redmonk.com/sogrady/archives/000743.htm l [redmonk.com]

      gary edwards, member of oasis opendocuemnt tc, comments on ms xml, od and related stuff. you really should read the whole comment, but i'll cite a couple of excerpts that imho are relevant to your comment :)

      "Since MS XML looks to be a clone of OpenDoc XML, i think it's disingenuous to imply that Microsoft put so much time and effort into creating a duplicate XML file format to meet their "legacy" needs. This is a knockoff clear and simple. The work was done by OpenOffice.org, Sun Microsystems, and the OASIS OpenDocument Technical Committee."

      "The first 18 months of work at the OASIS OpenDoc TC (...), was focused near entirely on legacy systems. Especially legacy systems
      wedded to Microsoft binary file formats.

      The OpenDoc TC was very fortunate to have a wealth of expertise in reverse engineering the legacy maze of incompatible MS binary file formats. Experts from Corel Office, StarOffice, Boeing, Stellent, ArborText, and SpeedLegal among others had long made their living reverse engineering MS file formats. Phil Boutros, the legendary binary cracking wizard representing Stellent, near single handedly represented what would have otherwise been thought to be the full cooperation of Microsoft in solving these legacy issues."

      "At any time Microsoft was and is able to jump into the TC discussion's about their legacy file formats and the transformation issues that were eventually resolved in the OpenDoc XML specification. They did after all have an official membership on the OpenDoc TC."

  • No OO support in MS Office (Score:5, Insightful)

    by jurt1235 ( 834677 ) on Tuesday September 06, 2005 @05:19AM (#13488490) Homepage
    MS Motto: Extend and embrace.

    People also tend to use one office set. So Mas. switching to OO, could end up people downloading OO to be able to use the documents (Ok, there are PDF versions). MS will most likely counter that by releasing an update or a plugin to be able to read OO documents in some twisted destructive, or correct later on way, and not being able to save OO documents.

    I just think that MS will support OO formats soon enough, because they would really not like to lose customers over such a simple thing as a document format, hey, they even might be able to sell the OO upgrade for MS office to these people!

  • Inferior format (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Decaff ( 42676 ) on Tuesday September 06, 2005 @05:21AM (#13488499)
    From the article:

    "Microsoft will not support OpenDocument in its next version of Office 12 as it believed the format to be inferior"

    If the format is 'inferior', then extend it! The X in XML (which is used by OpenDocument) stands for 'eXtensible'. XML is designed to allow document formats to be extended in a way which still allows portability and does not break compatibility.

    Microsoft have make extensive use of XML for years, so they know this. This comment is simply pure FUD.

    • Re:Inferior format (Score:5, Insightful)

      by hixie ( 116369 ) <ian@hixie.ch> on Tuesday September 06, 2005 @07:10AM (#13488866) Homepage
      Um, the whole point of an open standard format is that it is an open standard -- you can't just add random new things to it, it wouldn't be compliant to the open standard any more.

      What you're asking Microsoft to do here would in fact be exactly what they normall do; embrace and extend. And it would be bad for all the reasons it is normally bad: it would make files that claim to be OpenDocument files no longer work with OpenDocument-compliant UAs. Thus fragmenting the marketplace.

      You know, like they did with HTML and the DOM.

    • I also guess they will be dropping RTF, "Plain Text", "Web Page", and MS Works as valid formats, as these are clearly inferior to the basic MS Office format.

      MS already allows users to "Save As" to reduced formats, even if Open Doc was reduced (which it certainly isn't in terms of multi-media) then Microsoft have already set the precedent of Load/Save from "inferior" formats.

      Its not just FUD... its Stupid FUD

  • Lame excuses from MS (Score:5, Insightful)

    by DrXym ( 126579 ) on Tuesday September 06, 2005 @05:32AM (#13488533)
    I have to laugh at this quote "the Office 12 formats pay special attention to compatibility with older document versions, [and] other formats do not concern themselves with this important issue.".


    What??? MS Word can already load and save a large variety of formats, many of which have nothing whatsoever to do with any past version of Word. For example it loads and saves WordPerfect files. Presumably they did that so government and law could use their word processor. So what was the reason for not supporting OpenDocument format again? It certainly has nothing to writing another import / export filter since the APIs for that must be OLD HAT.


    Why not just be honest and say the real reason. You don't want to support it since your own formats represent lock-in. But sooner or later they will have to though I reckon they'll do their utmost to sabotage it becoming the defacto standard.


    Slightly OT: The quote reminds of the absurdities MS put out when saying why they wouldn't port MS Office to OS/2. At the time one of them said they wouldn't port it since it didn't support OLE2. Yes, and who wrote OLE2? Such ludicrous excuses emanate from MS when the real reason they don't want to do something would leave them open to accusations of monopoly.

  • They have a valid reason for concern.... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by kg4czo ( 516374 ) on Tuesday September 06, 2005 @06:04AM (#13488629)
    Massachusetts has a valid reason to worry. The worry about future readability of the data they are producing today. What if M$ went away in the next 30 years? What if, while going down hill, they decided to bleed their customers for the use of their XML "standard?" I don't doubt this could happen....

    I also don't buy Microsoft's stance on the OpenDoc format. They can, and should, implement this format as an export/import at the least. Backwards compatability is a sorry excuse for not implementing open standards. They just don't want to give up the gold they find when they have locked their customers into a certain format.

  • Dang, not again (Score:5, Insightful)

    by smsiebe ( 895713 ) on Tuesday September 06, 2005 @06:06AM (#13488635)
    This may turn out to be a problem for students and those of us that work at home. I had a similar problem when I was going to college for CS a few years back. My professor required our C++ to be created in a Windows-only compiler, commented and structured using that editors tools. I was only running Linux, just as I am now, and had to get an exception to policy in order to not have to live in the computer lab.

    Now, working on my EE degree while in the Army, I am doing distance learning with a school that requires MS Office formats on papers. So far, it has been working out well but what if they 'upgrade' to a new office version that somehow corrupts or otherwise does not display a file created in OO well? There goes my GPA!

    Same goes for my job in that Army. As an NCO I often times complete work at home and bring it to my work terminal (all MS, after the recent Solaris genocide) on a USB stick. Will all my work be for nothing? Will I be spending hours at the office instead of at home where I can at least be with my wife and kids? I guess the same can go for those that tele-commute and use Linux.

    Man, I REALLY don't want to have to install Windows or use an emulator just to use Office.

  • The last paragraph made me laugh (Score:5, Interesting)

    by el_womble ( 779715 ) on Tuesday September 06, 2005 @06:21AM (#13488674) Homepage
    "the Office 12 formats pay special attention to compatibility with older document versions, [and] other formats do not concern themselves with this important issue."

    ROTFL. Anyone that has had to distribute anything via Word knows this is beyond FUD. My best example is my CV. I wrote it in Mac Office 2004, and made sure it was compatible (using compatibility checker) all the way back to Word 97. It wasn't even close. In the end I was sending my CV out as Word 97, 2000, RTF and PDF just to make sure.

    Backwards compatibility my arse. It nearly cost me a job, as when your in IT, and people think you can't even use word, it starts to look bad. I understand that its a word processor, not a desktop publisher, but is consistant handling of tables and pictures that much to ask?

    I've had documents that would open in Word 2004 fine, but all the pictures would be rotated through 90 degrees on Word 2000. And thats before you start looking at the way it handles the difference between A4 and Letter.

    The only way I can send a file and be certain that it looks the way it should is via PDF. But thats at the expense of other parties being able to edit it.

    PDF isn't the solution, its a hack. I want/need the consistant typesetting of PDF, with the editting features of Word. Now I know there are other applications that let me do this (latex et al), I just wish other people did too so I could start using that instead of frigin office.
    • In the end I was sending my CV out as Word 97, 2000, RTF and PDF just to make sure.

      Just a .PDF should be fine right?

    • I did my resume in HTML the last two times I did a job search. There are several advantages: It is rendered well be a variety of web browser and email clients. I can stick it directly in the body of an HTML email rather than have it be an attachemnt. I can put it on my web site. It looks good when it is printed (you can even control where the page breaks will be using css).

      If you are looking for a tech job and have not considered HTML format for your resume, you must be living in 1988.

    • Its worse (Score:4, Informative)

      by SlashDread ( 38969 ) on Tuesday September 06, 2005 @07:54AM (#13489045)
      As a professional Office Automation Analyst, I can vouch for MS Office products not being 100% backward compatible, but whats worse, they are not 100% forward compatible either.

      Case in point: I have several 1000's word 200o doc's with tables and indexes. Nothing spectacular. Yet, Office 2003 majorly screws with tabel alignment, and indexes are corrupt, and need to be set again.

      Do I need to continue on MS Visio and MS Project? Same stuff. Most works, but often it also does not.

      I have people saving thing with Project 2000 in Project 97 format, otherwise resources would dissapear and be un-editable in Project 2003.

      MS is doing one, and only one thing: They are holding all our doc's hostage, and most of there profit is due to it, so they will stick to it no matter what.

  • Keeping up with the Jones' (Score:3, Informative)

    by teslatug ( 543527 ) on Tuesday September 06, 2005 @06:43AM (#13488758)
    Brian Jones [msdn.com], is an Office PM at Microsoft. Here's his whining [msdn.com] and lame attempt [msdn.com] at lying^H^H^Hexplaining why their format is open and even "compatible" with the LGPL (only compatible in the way that a proprietary plugin could work with an LGPL-ed program). The comments on those two posts are pretty interesting though.

  • MS True Colors (Score:4, Interesting)

    by salesgeek ( 263995 ) on Tuesday September 06, 2005 @06:45AM (#13488768) Homepage
    Microsoft is showing it's anticompetitive true colors on this one. Would be smart if they focused on compatibility as their customers aren't asking - they are saying we will not buy it if it does not meet our standards.

    Forcing your standards on customers is dangerous - after all it's their data and their business, not yours.

  • Watch MicroSquirm! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by erroneus ( 253617 ) on Tuesday September 06, 2005 @07:00AM (#13488829) Homepage
    Microsoft wasted no time writing in the ability to handle other word processor formats. Word Perfect format was a specific target. "Inferior" as it may be, they took special care to make their Word capable not only of handling Word Perfect documents, but also assisted users through software in the process.

    It would be a nice change for MS to simply tell the plain truth -- there's not enough profit motive for them to cut their own throats by giving their customers the means to migrate away from their most profitable product and I doubt there ever will be.

    When I was watching the MS antitrust stuff happening, I really thought that was the beginning of the end for Microsoft. I was both gleeful and a little scared. Taking a lesson from countless other businesses under government investigation, they bought their way out of it through donations to politicians who, in turn, would support MS's interests.

    But now there is this... the gradual chipping away at Microsoft's hold on government data by not only Massachusetts, but other governmental bodies as well. (Other nations, local governments, etc.) Some suggest that these chips are merely attempts to get Microsoft to cut them a nicer deal. While the results of some of those deals show this effect, can you really claim that the result was the intent? It would be like throwing a dart and claiming that whatever it hit was the intended target. We can see were Microsoft's attempts to dissuade have failed. Without inside knowledge, no one can really know the intent. But even in those cases, these activities show that Microsoft is being weakened in some small way each and every time they have to deal with these situations. They either need to lower their prices or face becoming irrelevant... and that's the best case scenario! The worst is that there is nothing they can do to save their sinking ship.

  • Legal or Technology issues (Score:4, Insightful)

    by thunderpaws ( 199100 ) on Tuesday September 06, 2005 @07:09AM (#13488860)
    The more I read about this it seems that MA is more concerned about MS's propiretary schemas and patents that could affect the legal distribution and use of the states documents. The potential effects would be massive. State, county, local governments, schools and agencies, as well as private sector business's would have signifiacant concerns about the digital distribution and use of state documents, allowing the only workaround to be printing the material.

  • Wow, common sense appears to mean something (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Pecisk ( 688001 ) on Tuesday September 06, 2005 @07:26AM (#13488924)
    First of all, I can be honest and true and yes, MS Office dominates, there is no doubt about that. However, I see *perfect legal* reasons to Massachusetts to choose open format. And Microsoft rethorics about 'how the real world deals with it' [tm] doesn't work.

    It is nice to see goverment institutions which start to get it, that your IT infrastructure isn't video game - there should be REAL rules to follow. And there are no written in favor of some kind big business who wants it's format be main in goverment documentation.

    For some reason, I'm really not surprised about reaction of Microsoft. What I am surprised about that they insist to their stubborness and stupidness in this topic. They just make their own grave in this situation.

  • Archive Search (Score:5, Informative)

    by HermanAB ( 661181 ) on Tuesday September 06, 2005 @08:08AM (#13489114)
    I think a major problem with MS Office is its lack of archive value. If you have thousands (or millions) of documents and someone misfiles something, you cannot simply search the contents of the documents for a known string. Ferinstance, "egrep 'John Doe' *.doc" doesn't work so well, but it works on Corel WordPerfect files, and adding gzip into a pipe works on OOo docs. In a law office for example, it is very useful to be able to find precedents on obscure subjects that are only handled once or twice in several years and searching a collection of MS documents just doesn't work. This has convinced many lawyers to rather stick with Corel and not move to MS Office.

  • Who Should Control Your Information? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by eno2001 ( 527078 ) on Tuesday September 06, 2005 @09:23AM (#13489592) Homepage Journal
    We're talking about public record here. Considering Microsoft's dismal track record with DRM and wanting to control data that they have no business controlling, do you really want public records in their document formats? One of the things that Microsoft has been touting is the ability for their documents to have access lists and be traceable. This is really bad news for whistle blowers in the public sector. How else do you leak documents that SHOULD be leaked? In case anyone has forgotten, it's your government. They are YOUR servants, not your masters.

    This should be a federal initiative. If our feds weren't so in bed with corporate America, this would be a no brainer. Proprietary document formats with DRM are a bad thing for public record. Don't even mention the fact that with each revision Microsoft has a tendency to break documents in older formats in new and horrendous ways. The idea of having embedded resources beyond text is also monumentally stupid. Embedding URLs for various resources that may shift or wind up being dead later is stupid. Embedding video and sound clips while "neat" stops working unless the media clip is actually made a part of the document. Most users aren't smart enough to do that, so the embedded clip stops working when the document and the media clip are separated. And in the event that the user DOES actually know how to embed the clip properly, then you wind up with a 250 Meg word document that's really nice to try and send via e-mail.

    If government moved to an open document format and only kept the most important information (most government business is better conducted via text) in text with limited use of graphics and a complete ban on media clips, we'd be better off in the long run. As a sidenote, if a document seems to "need" media clips, then your not doing your job, or maybe you've been tasked with something that should have gone to PR and a proper media production outfit. My money is on the former in 99.9% of the cases.

  • Taxes (Score:3, Interesting)

    by rlp ( 11898 ) on Tuesday September 06, 2005 @09:45AM (#13489751)
    I'd like to see my own state do this. I don't really care about the format issue (with one important exception). Don't care about the OSS vs. Microsoft argument. As a taxpayer, I do care about two things:

    • Most governments are paying for tens of thousands (or more) copies of a software application, when they can get a perfectly acceptable alternative for FREE
    • Proprietary formats are intended to lead to vendor lock-in. This is NEVER a good thing for the customer and can lead to much higher costs


    State and local government budgets have been severely strained for the past few years. Why would anyone want their government to waste money on an office package.
  • The article says:

    Massachusetts agencies have until 1 January, 2007, to install applications that support the OpenDocument file formats and phase out other products.

    From a Tobacco Settlement document [66.102.7.104]
      at the GAO, most state's fiscal years begin July 1, except Alabama and Michigan, where the fiscal year begins on October 1, and in New York, where the fiscal year begins on April 1.

    I am having trouble figuring out from Google when the budget deadline is, but this would appear to imply that every Massachusetts agency will have to put in a budget request before this coming July for a related budget (i.e. hire some company to install it and train them), unless they can handle it in house (since OOo is free).

    But government is not necessarily driven by a cost of $0. It seems to me that this means there is a great opportunity for open source software companies to get jobs from Massachusetts, and also for software developers.

    There should be a big push to ensure that there are plenty of mature projects with easy to use GPL libraries supporting the OpenDocument format, and resources should be put into developing lots of different kinds of software that supports it. This will help ensure a diverse ecology including providers and users of these tools, open content, and increased momentum to buy into it. This could match what is called "Embrace and Extend [wikipedia.org]". In Embrace and Extend [and Extinguish], as the Wiki notes, support of a given standard is announced, after the PR partial compatibility is provided, then proprietary functions get tacked on and finally widespread use of their mangled format in various products and tools makes it impossible to compete, and they own the (mangled) standard which they can then kill if they wish.

    OpenOffice/OpenDocument can be marketed as superior to MS Office. It's just a matter of PR, isn't it Microsoft? And we don't even need any FUD, after all if we have SMIL in OpenDocument then we can integrate web-ready media, etc.

    Perhaps a new brand could be created called "Office Plus".

    Anyway, where M$ embraces and extends with proprietary and patented code, the free software community has the GPL.

    And by putting more energy in to leveraging OpenOffice and OpenDocument format, including making it easy to do so, we can implement the Extend and Extinguish phase. If there are enough alternatives, including OpenOffice, reduced feature set but simpler to use software based on its code, tools such as database generated documents and fill-in forms, etc., we can build a suction to draw people away from M$ Office. There will be many alternatives even if M$ belatedly adds Import/Export for OpenDocument, by which time adding it will be even worse for Microsoft.

    Personally I do contribute to debugging OOo as a user but have never gotten into its code or documentation though I should. Just imagining what it must be like has been too dauntin. But I certainly would like to be able to output reports in OOo format, and instead of CSV perhaps use OOo's Calc format for example.

    As another example, I was working on workflow software that munges excel data, and thought about adding a spreadsheet input function (to wxPerl). This exists in WxWidgets, but it woul be nice if bits of OOo code found its way into there so that people could easily use OOo facilities, perhaps driven with some scripting from inside a document.

    I just noticed as I was writing this that there are a bunch of perl modules on CPAN for OpenOffice for example, think I'll start there.

  • what a hoot! (Score:3, Insightful)

    by mysticgoat ( 582871 ) on Tuesday September 06, 2005 @10:08AM (#13489912) Homepage Journal

    Reading about Microsoft's "concern" about open formats not providing adequate support for legacy documents in old formats has me chuckling.

    I started using StarOffice years ago, and started recommending it to others, solely because it was the only effective way to move MS Office documents between versions of MS Office.

    Of course I'm strange-- I've stayed with MS Office 97 all these years for reasons that Microsoft apparently consider to be stupid:

    • Anything I produce with it is readable with any other version of MS Office in common use. This cannot be said about later versions of MS Office.
    • I'm used to the interface and have had years of consistently high productivity with it, with none of the periods of lost productivity that are associated with changing software.
    • I've found that when I can't do something easily in MS Office 97, there is something wrong in my approach-- usually I'm getting more byzantine in my attempted solution than the problem calls for.
    • MS Office 97 has migrated very well from WinNT to Win98 to WinME and the WinXP Pro that I'm currently using. From what I've seen of other's experience, the same hasn't been true for later versions of MS Office.

    I do like the interface on OpenOffice v2.0 (I've started using the beta, which seems to be at least as stable as the MS Office 97 workhorse). I think it is about time I upgraded to it.

  • Why OpenDocument Won (and Microsoft didn't) (Score:3, Interesting)

    by dwheeler ( 321049 ) on Tuesday September 06, 2005 @10:11AM (#13489937) Homepage Journal
    You might want to look at this essay: Why OpenDocument Won (and Microsoft Office Open XML Didn't) [dwheeler.com]

  • Things to help MA (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Todd Knarr ( 15451 ) on Tuesday September 06, 2005 @10:42AM (#13490198) Homepage

    Open-source coders and OO.o can add one or two things to help MA apply egg to MS's face. Those things are light-weight, small plug-in viewers for various Web browsers on Windows that can be set up to be installed through the browser's standard plug-in/add-on installation interface. Make it easy, when people hit a Web page referring to OO.o documents on MA's sites, to get their browser set up to view, print and save the documents (editing isn't, I believe, too neccesary here). Have the viewer, when it's installed, add the appropriate hooks so that once OO.o documents are saved the browser and plug-in get used when you double-click on the document later. In short, make the viewing experience as seamless as possible so it's only MSOffice that seems to have problems with OO.o documents. We all know what the average Windows user is like, so make it Microsoft's problem to explain why MSOffice won't work when they get calls like "Word won't open this document! When I visit the MA web site I can see it just fine, but Word won't open it! Why's Word broken?". :)

    MA can add to that by putting links to the OO.o downloads page on all the pages that link to OO.o documents. Make it easy for users to ask "But everybody else makes it so easy, why is Office the only thing that gives me problems?".

  • Oh, Please! More Fucking Lies! (Score:3, Informative)

    by Master of Transhuman ( 597628 ) on Tuesday September 06, 2005 @11:41AM (#13490714) Homepage
    'Yates reiterated the Microsoft does not intend to natively support the OpenDocument format, which he said was very specific to the OpenOffice.org 2.0 open source productivity suite.

    Microsoft has since confirmed this view.

    A Microsoft executive said last week, after the report was released, that Microsoft will not support OpenDocument in its next version of Office 12 as it believed the format to be inferior and said is not compatible with older versions of Office, , according to InformationWeek.

    Alan Yates, general manager of Microsoft's Information Worker Business Strategy, told CRN last Friday that Office 12 would not support OpenDocument because "the Office 12 formats pay special attention to compatibility with older document versions, [and] other formats do not concern themselves with this important issue."'

    Anybody knows that OpenOffice is adequately compatible with older Office formats, and that Microsoft's OWN suite is NOT. Also, OpenOffice 2.0 is specifically intended to be MORE compatible with Office for the obvious reason that it needs to be.

    This is their "standard" excuse now for not supporting standards such as CSS: "The standard is 'inferior'."

    To WHAT? THEIR "standard" - which doesn't even exist?

    This is more proof that Microsoft personnel authorized to speak to the public are unmitigated LIARS. NOTHING that comes out of the mouth of a Microsoft employee - or a /. Microsoft shill - is to be believed.

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