Article on Proposal for Massachusetts to move to OpenDocument
I just read this article today about Massachusetts wanting to move away from closed formats and standardize on open formats (OpenOffice's XML and PDF). While it's not mentioned in the article, from what I've been told there is not yet a decision made, rather a proposal brought forward and is under consideration.
I think that a number of the points raised in the article are really great. Moving to document formats that are open, documented, and royalty-free is actually really valuable. I've been talking for awhile now about the benefits people will get now that we are moving to open XML formats in the next version of Office. This is really a big deal. The default format for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint in Office 12 will be completely open, meaning you aren't tied into Microsoft software to access your files. They will now totally belong to you and you have control over them. I'm extremely excited about the opportunity this gives to people to build solutions that operate on Office documents and it's royalty-free (no cost).
I'm a bit stunned by the overall proposal that was brought forward to the State though as it seems to be a bit short sighted and unnecessarily exclusive. I question why the proposal has this exclusivity given the fact that there has been no thorough research into the open XML formats for Office 12. The reason I say that there hasn't been thorough research is that we won't have our first Beta for another couple months, so I doubt they could have looked into it much. If they had, I can't imagine that they would have made this decision as it actually provides the easiest path of moving from proprietary binary formats into open XML formats.
The Microsoft Office Open XML Formats will work for all those billions of Office documents that already exist today. We are going to provide bulk upgrade converters that allow you to easily convert from the binary formats into the XML formats. Everything that you could represent in the existing binary formats you will be able to represent in XML. This means all features and functionality that people have come to expect from their office products will be stored in XML. This was actually a huge undertaking. The Office applications are very large, and while most people only certain features, each person uses a different set, and in the end all features are used. Trying to lock out those documents and forcing people to lose data and functionality is not really a great idea.
-Brian
Comments
Anonymous
August 31, 2005
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August 31, 2005
<p>Something like that, Siva. The XML file format license does not allow developing interoperable programs that are GPL-licensed. Check this <a href="http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1829355,00.asp">eWeek article</a>. If Brian were honest, he would not be as "stunned" and he would see why the proposal is not "unnecessarily exclusive". He could counter the GPL-argument by telling us how it is not a problem, e.g. because there is loads of open-source software that is not GPL-licensed, or by telling us that the XML file format license has been misread by GNU.</p>
<p>Instead, even though he must be aware of these issues, he ignores them and is "stunned" instead. That uncovers his posting as nothing more than FUD. A person interested in discussion and resolving of issues would aknowledge the other party's concerns and either give counter-arguments or concede that there are problems left. He did neither.</p>Anonymous
August 31, 2005
actually, the fact that feedback from the commonwealth of mass. led to changes in the office 12 xml schema license agreement is mentioned explicitly in the office 12 xml schema faq (http://www.microsoft.com/Office/xml/faq.mspx) indicates to me that Mass. is not being short-sighted and have indeed put a lot of thought and research into which formats and software soltuions they want to use in the future...Anonymous
August 31, 2005
Groklaw are claiming it is now ratified, rather than just being a proposal (http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20050831202118904).
I think maybe they chose Oasis OpenDocument without evaluating the new Office formats because they want a format that is not mandated by a company with a vested interest. I could be wrong.
Out of interest is the new XML format going to be the default format for saving files from within Word 12? If not, what is the argument for not doing so?Anonymous
September 01, 2005
Um...why would Mass. consider a product and a file spec that is unavailable outside of a tiny number of downloads and a very small number of carefully controlled demos. Outside of Redmond and the Mac BU campus, Office 12 is vapor. You make your decisions on what you have available, not what the king of empty promises is promising.Anonymous
September 01, 2005
Perhaps Brain will correct his comments on the "short-sighted" nature of the Massachusetts decision in light of their pre-beta participation in the dicussion of Office 12?
Or is MS so arrogant to consider any non-MS Office 12 decision to be "short-sighted?" Perhaps it is licensing and schema decisions for Office 12 that are the "short-sighted" ones in this discussion.Anonymous
September 01, 2005
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September 01, 2005
Ross - yes, the default format for Office will be the open XML format, as stated in every article/press release/mention of the new formats, including this post.
"The default format for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint in Office 12 will be completely open, meaning you aren't tied into Microsoft software to access your files."Anonymous
September 01, 2005
From my blog at this link: http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=1800,
"My open question for Brian is, can you or will you support and default to OpenDoc instead? That would end the whole controversy? If not, why not? Not only that, is it true that we'll have to wait for Office 12? With all those programmers in Redmond, surely someone up there in the Pacific NorthWest can write an upgrade for the current versions of Office."Anonymous
September 01, 2005
I current work at a vendor selling to state and federal governments; and these questions of interoperability come up in at least half the meetings I go to these days.
I'm sure in a release or two Office will be supporting standards based documents; because once you get beyond the smallest internal project for a single government agency interoperability across systems so all agencies participating can access the data is practically the most important criteria.
It's a shame the current office doesn't support the standards but I'd bet a lot that the next one will - at least for select customers.Anonymous
September 01, 2005
Josh: "the default format for Office will be the open XML format, as stated in every article/press release/mention of the new formats, including this post."
Most articles I've seen point out that
despite being called "Office Open XML Formats", they're really closed formats with quite restrictive licenses:
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1829355,00.aspAnonymous
September 01, 2005
The answer is simple. Just add read/write support for the format. The same way you do for WordPerfect etc.
Problem solved ! Wasn't that easy !
The only reason for not doing so would be to prevent interoperability with non-Microsoft software. And I have read many press releases from Microsoft saying how interested you are in interoperability, so you surely can't be suggesting that, can you :-).
Jeremy Allison,
Samba Team.Anonymous
September 01, 2005
John M: "...despite being called "Office Open XML Formats", they're really closed formats with quite restrictive licenses."
Precisely. Governments should not store the public's data in a form with potential licensing encumberances. Even if the license grants exceptions for government use, doing so causes Network Effects (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect), which give the format an unfair market advantage over its rivals. Since Microsoft has already been proven to possess monopoly power, this is doubly undesirable.Anonymous
September 01, 2005
If Microsoft has no interest in writing the code to support OpenDocument, would MS be willing to enable (by providing the necessary development tools) a group of open source developers to write
a OpenDocument plugin for Office 12 under a license like the Berkeley Licence? Would MS be willing to include this plugin in Office 12 if it worked well enough?Anonymous
September 01, 2005
This is easy to understand:
1. OpenDocument can be implemented by any developer, using any license, without any restrictions or royalty payments. Microsoft can implement it, as can GPL'ed software.
2. OpenDocument was developed and maintained by a vendor-neutral standards body (OASIS). Microsoft's XML format wasn't, and isn't.
Microsoft can choose to do what it likes. But customers want a completely open standard, and if Microsoft fails to provide what its customers want, it shouldn't be surprised to find out that the customers choose something else. Microsoft can, at any time, choose to implement OpenDocument; it doesn't need to lose any business. But if Microsoft chooses to ignore the needs of its customers, then it shouldn't be surprised to find it has lost its customers.Anonymous
September 01, 2005
Brian Jones: "The Office applications are very large, and while most people only certain features, each person uses a different set, and in the end all features are used. Trying to lock out those documents and forcing people to lose data and functionality is not really a great idea."
I believe this statement is misleading. These people are not "locked out" of their documents. Rather, their documents are "locked in" to Microsoft. If Microsoft truly had these people's interests at heart, all it needs to do is document those document formats and release all IP claims on them. Then they could be read and written with any program these people wanted.Anonymous
September 01, 2005
Is there a finishing school that upper management in Microsoft must attend before they can work there?
I'm sorry but all these MS talking heads with their "unbiased" studies really just end up making me feel nauseated.
Are these MS drones actually aware of how they sound to the masses? How disconnected from reality they seem?
All I have to do is read some post by a MS employee and I get a feeling of deja vu, one that reminds me of seeing the press releases of the Iraqi Information Minister.
As a long time Windows user (certifications, etc...) the only thing that has driven me away from MS based products are MS's own actions. Imagine that.Anonymous
September 01, 2005
Thanks for all the interest. It always excites me to see that this topic isn't just important to me and that there are a large number of strong opinions out there. I think we can all agree that open documented formats are extremely important. That's why we did the XML formats in Office 2003, and it's why we are moving to default XML formats for Office 12. We also made the decision to provide updates for Office 2000, XP, and 2003, so that everyone with those applications can also read and write these new XML formats.
A number of the questions and concerns raised have already been discussed earlier this summer. You can read this post: (http://blogs.msdn.com/brian_jones/archive/2005/06/13/428655.aspx) if you want to hear more about why we currently aren't planning to support the OpenOffice format. You can also read this post (http://blogs.msdn.com/brian_jones/archive/2005/06/02/424517.aspx) if you want to know more about the licenses. I think you'll find if you read the license or the FAQ that it's pretty sweet.
I'd love to reply to everyone's concerns directly, but I'm actually on vacation right now and I'll get in trouble if I spend too much time online. One of my best friends is getting married on Saturday and we have pre-wedding stuff going on today and tomorrow leading up to the wedding. I guess it was a bad idea making that post the night before heading out, but I had just read the article and wanted to put in my 2 cents. I'll try to pull together another post early next week. I'll also be at PDC the entire following week, so if anyone is there please swing by and we can talk about it.
-BrianAnonymous
September 01, 2005
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September 01, 2005
If a document needs to be universally accessible, the rendering application should ALSO be available on most OS platforms freely. Just openness of the format is not enough. Even if government starts distributing Office 12 open XML documents you can't expect people to go out and spend $$$ to buy Office just to render them when all they have is their cheap Linux PC from Wallmart. This should sufice why Office 12 Open XML formats is no big deal in this space.Anonymous
September 01, 2005
Thanks to the efforts of some of the folks from Waggener Edstrom, I'm hopefully going to be speaking with Microsoft about the Massachusetts announcement soon. I'm likely to dig into the second question from my original entry - about potential...Anonymous
September 01, 2005
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September 01, 2005
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September 01, 2005
What would prevent MS from adding in a save as option for the openDoc format, but to do a botched job of conforming to standards such that openoffice.org does not render properly, but when this same file is opened in word it will open properly? It seems this would be trivial to implement and could muddy the opendocument standard in the same way that html used on the web is far from the open standard it was meant to be (with both old netscape and MS introducing extensions and non-standard rendering of pages)Anonymous
September 01, 2005
Oh Brian come on...if you intended this blog to be a propaganda site why'd you bother (besides getting paid to do so)? You say you are stunned that the government would choose an open standard, why aren't you stunned at all the documents locked into MS Word that can't be accessed unless you a) Pay for Windows or pay for Apple and b) pay for Office. Not everyone has $500+ to throw around just to open up a document sent to them. Why don't you implement the OpenDoc format? No one is stopping you, unline people who would have to implement your standard. You're quick to point off to that FAQ, but last I checked that FAQ doesn;t have a statement by your lawyers saying that your format is compatible with the GPL. Sure FSF lawyers might say that it's compatible, but you can always argue and win in court later by saying they aren't. If instead you guys say that it is, then you can calm and reassure everyone that they won't be sued into the ground by implementing your doc. But you won't do that of course, because your aim is not interoperability.Anonymous
September 01, 2005
They have chosen to endorse OPEN standards instead of Microsoft's idea of what an open standard should be (hint: cost-free is necessary but certainly not sufficient).
Microsoft's 'open' formats might be technically superior but the govt shouldn't have to rely on Microsoft alone (obviously you don't feel that way, but almost everyone else does). If your license isn't 'use this info for any purpose whatsoever, yes, even for Free and Open Source software', then it isn't good enough.
The cost (both in freedom and in money) of ease of migration AWAY from current tools is now a major part of the decision portfolio of any responsible IT management, and you'll just have to deal with it instead of whining.Anonymous
September 01, 2005
Brian says that Microsoft's XML is open. Others dispute this, but even if it is so, it doesn't solve the problem.
What is to stop Microsoft from deciding that Office 13 will go back to a completely closed format?
Remember how Microsoft swore on a stack of bibles that it would never produce a closed version of Kerberos, and then one day, with no warning, they did it?
Or how about how Microsoft signed a contract with Sun to produce a cross-platform version of Java, and then purposely made it Windows only?
Most people learn by, say, age 6 that if you want people to trust you, you have to act in a trustworthy manner. Microsoft executives seem to have never learned this lesson.Anonymous
September 01, 2005
First I want to say sorry for all of the sites that are complaining about you. Personally I think it is a bad idea for mass. to switch from office. First office is a standard, most people have office, and most people know how to use it. Switching to another system is going to be more then a nightmare, it is a train reck waiting to happen.Anonymous
September 01, 2005
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September 01, 2005
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September 02, 2005
You deserve this! I hope its followed by govts around the world.
You now have 3 choices:
1)Open up your own doc formats completely (put them essentially in the public domain) with a guarantee that they will remain so in perpetuity.
2)Just implement OpenDocument filters already!
3)Lobby/bribe local politicians, give local schools 'free' Microsoft software, etc.
Gee, I wonder what you'll choose? Enjoy climbing the greasy pole.Anonymous
September 02, 2005
They have 4 choice
4) Dont sell Office to Massachuset. Lets them use OpenOffice and fail. Massachuset will be a symbol of failure. Case of competitor failure is very effective marketing tool.
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You now have 3 choices:
1)Open up your own doc formats completely (put them essentially in the public domain) with a guarantee that they will remain so in perpetuity.
2)Just implement OpenDocument filters already!
3)Lobby/bribe local politicians, give local schools 'free' Microsoft software, etc.Anonymous
September 02, 2005
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Quote:TanNg
They have 4 choice
4) Dont sell Office to Massachuset. Lets them use OpenOffice and fail. Massachuset will be a symbol of failure. Case of competitor failure is very effective marketing tool.
----------------
MS is a business, and businesses like to make money. Lots of money. They fear mass. w/o office will not fail. The mass. gov't is simply setting up a scenario to where they are not locked in to ms office, so if and when a time comes to cut an IT budget MS Office will get the axe and not any mass. gov't employees.
I recall reading about a Wisconsin school system that had a desktop computer in every room, and MS reps forced them to renew the os license. The WI-DOE responded to the increased costs with "we will remove MS and install linux" and the MS reps were in shock. Overall it was better for WI since they didn't have to let any teachers go jobless just to renew software licenses.Anonymous
September 02, 2005
I'd give a little more credibility to this if it wasn't all air. All very nice to talk about how 'open' Microsoft's format is, and how MA 'locking in' users by requesting open standards, but please provide;
1) evidence that Microsoft's definition of 'open' permits usage unencumbered by license terms incompatible with open-source competitors,
2) a list of all competitor's software currently using Microsoft's 'open' 'standard',
3) an explanation of how an open, unencumbered by patent or license issues, freely distributable and standards compliant format is 'exclusive',
4) why you would even care, given that Microsoft was specifically offered a chance to provide a truly open solution, and declined to do so.
As long as Microsoft continues with their attitude that being a monopoly constitutes a 'standard' and the rest of the world simply should follow along like good little sheep, then they will continue to garner skepticism, and reasonable people will continue to look for alternatives to vendor-lockin. Multi-billion dollar cash reserves may be very good at buying media coverage to preach FUD, but it doesn't guarantee that people will believe it. Please search google for wisdom regarding leading horses to water...Anonymous
September 02, 2005
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September 02, 2005
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September 02, 2005
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September 03, 2005
'Open' standards controlled by one organisation when that organisation has a virtual monoploy do not actually help anyone.
With the R&D budget of Microsoft you take MSOffice XML version 1, publish the 'standards' when the product is released. By the time the rest of the industry has caught up MS brings out version 2, and office 14, which is subtley incompatible - but of course to the benefit of new features that everyone needs.
No other organisation, open source or not, stands a chance of implementing the moving target of these 'open' formats.
Open means a lot more than published and freeley available. To be useful people are overlooking the fact that they can't be solely controlled by the one organisation that dominates the industry.Anonymous
September 03, 2005
PDF = Open??
Since when is Adobe PDF and open file format? You have to have a license to their SDK to write to it and I think that unlike the Office XML it is not free of fees on the license. PDF is extremly closed. It seems like the state of Mass just has something against Microsoft in saying they are open selecting XML but then being closed in using PDF.Anonymous
September 04, 2005
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September 04, 2005
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September 04, 2005
Dear Brian,
You wrote:
"They will now totally belong to you and you have control over them."
This has to be understood as "until then, they dont ?"
Interesting!
Regards,
FAnonymous
September 05, 2005
Wow, there were a ton of great comments on my last post. While there were a large number of them, there...Anonymous
September 05, 2005
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September 05, 2005
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September 05, 2005
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September 05, 2005
A detail, minor, perhaps. Rob said:
"I'd give a little more credibility to this if it wasn't all air. All very nice to talk about how 'open' Microsoft's format is, and how MA 'locking in' users by requesting open standards, but please provide; [...]
2) a list of all competitor's software currently using Microsoft's 'open' 'standard', "
OpenDocument isn't just used by OpenOffice.org. Its xml-and-zip-based predecessor is available for OpenOffice.org's competitors such as AbiWord and KWord. It can even be implemented on that greatest of all Macintosh word processors, Nisus, and if you were dedicated enough and had the source, on Claris' MacWord. Ditto for Wordperfect 5.1, still the ultimate DOS wordprocessor, and even Wordstar, if that pulls your chain!
That's what I call an Open Standard. But, a "standard" that only one company can fully implement, one that relies of gotchas in its license, doesn't strike me as Open in any way worth considering. It does however, strike me as being absurdly mystical where it should be practical, and invites comparison to the Tumblebug in one of James Branch Cabell's hilarious Poictesme novels, the "Biography of the Life of Manuel" - not "Figures of Earth", not "The Silver Stallion", I think it was in "Jurgen". Anyway, you'd know if you've read the aforementioned books, just what I was alluding to, and you'd quite possibly be angry ... ;)Anonymous
September 06, 2005
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September 06, 2005
*I question why the proposal has this exclusivity given the fact that there has been no thorough research into the open XML formats for Office 12. *
The answer to that is simple and one that MA full recognizes. Microsoft has the tendency to take any "standard" and make it incompatible with the original.
Your question is wrong. The question should be why shouldn't Microsoft be expected to comply 100% with a standard ? You know the answer.Anonymous
September 06, 2005
This argument is not about applications. It's about a document format. An open document format does not prevent one from using Microsoft products. If Microsoft supported a truly open document format, there wouldn't be much of a reason left for Mass. not to use MS Office, would there? It's a no-brainer for Microsoft to include an open document format, unless Microsoft is really attempting to lock-out competition, but we already knew that, didn't we?Anonymous
September 06, 2005
Brian when you say:
"I'm Brian Jones, a program manager in Office"
Its very confusing. There are many other office suites. Could I suggest saying "Microsoft Office".Anonymous
September 06, 2005
I think that the State of MA wants this standard is to open up their files/records to the that live and do business in MA.
Open Standards means Open Records. The only reason to adopt this standard is help the folks in MA have better government.Anonymous
September 06, 2005
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September 06, 2005
>>Friday, September 02, 2005 10:41 AM by TanNg
They have 4 choice
4) Dont sell Office to Massachuset. Lets them use OpenOffice and fail. Massachuset will be a symbol of failure. Case of competitor failure is very effective marketing tool.<<
You are not Microsoft's Windows OEM licensing manager by any chance are you? This is a strikingly similar strategy to Microsoft's OEM licensing policy which got Microsoft a criminal conviction.
It won't work in this case though. I've used both and OpenOffice is better than MS Office. No macro viruses either, and Massachusetts will save a bootload of money, and be able to offer customers a free fully functional reader/writer as well.
Anonymous
September 06, 2005
Some one said Massachuset CIO must be fired for losses on productivity that means money for the gov. But who will pay for the MS liceses?? That's the one who must be fired for the all that money spent, by the way the Massachuset citizens money. And finally its not about productivity but interoperabillity: if I were a Massachuset citizen do I must buy an MS Office to read a gov document? or if I have a complain do i must write it on MS Office? Massachuset gov can not put a lock on users freedom.
(sorry for my english...)Anonymous
September 06, 2005
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September 06, 2005
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September 06, 2005
Hey, guess what, Microsoft condemns OpenDoc as grossly inferior, but it's a member of the group that developed it!
http://www.theinquirer.org/?article=25933
Brian, how about an explanation of this?Anonymous
September 06, 2005
FTA: "They will now totally belong to you and you have control over them. I'm extremely excited about the opportunity this gives to people to build solutions that operate on Office documents and it's royalty-free (no cost)."
Brian
We'll never see eye-to-eye on this subject. You see an "open" file format from Microsoft. I see a file format with a patented XML schema and "royalty-free" license that only applies to applications which render MS formats according to Microsoft's specification.
Yes, I suppose in the Microsoft sphere that is your idea of "free", "open" and the user owning the file. It certainly isn't mine.
Now why does Microsoft worry about supporting an additional file format? Why does being "inferior" matter? MS supports plain text which is obviously "inferior". If you have a good product, you don't have to worry about all this legal mumbo-jumbo surrounding the file format. People will use Microsofts products if they truly win in the market place. And if you're concerned that because FOSS has no initial cost to the customer and that bars normal competition, then you should relaize that a product of this nature is now a commodity.Anonymous
September 06, 2005
If Microsoft wants to be open, you are certainly free to offer COMPLETE documentation of your file formats -- without licensing restrictions. But, while you offer a license without a charge in $$$$, it is highly restricted.
How "Open" is your XML when you continue to hide everthing in undocumented Binary Elements? How "Free" is your license, when licensees are required to keep track of each individual distribution of their programs, and can't allow recipients to re-modify this code and distribute their changes?
The answers are clear. Massachusetts has challenged Microsoft to provide complete documentation of its data formats without restriction (as several competitors do). And, Massachusetts has even taken a great deal of time to discuss their concerns with you in person, rather than mail you an RFP.
There are obvious financial reasons why Microsoft may choose to continue with the current policy... A policy of NOT providing its data formats without onerous licensing terms. Massachusetts has determined that storing data in such formats, based on restricted licenses which can change at the whim of the vendor, is not in the public interest.
You should try to meet their needs. Open your formats, with complete documentation of all contents, without any restrictions on use of those formats. And guarantee that no restrictions will be imposed at any future time.
That's what the competitors do. Can you do as well?Anonymous
September 06, 2005
Adobe publishes the complete specification for PDF documents, and AFAIK doesn't impose ANY restrictions on the use of that information. The software under discussion here, Microsoft Office, creates PDF output files (for Word Documents and Excel Spreadsheets) at the touch of a button. OpenOffice.org can do it to. A large number of non-Adobe programs (xpdf, etc.) can view them.
Lots of these programs (e.g., XPDF) are GPL licensed, allowing you to modify the code and distribute your modifications per the GPL.
Were you just guessing?Anonymous
September 06, 2005
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September 06, 2005
For me it is very simple.
As a person employed in the IT business, I want to make sure that our data is not locked down in a proprietary format, so that we can read and manipulate our data, across platforms.
As a citizen, I want to be able to communicate with my government, no matter if I have MS Office installed or not, and no matter what OS I might be using.
Rather than dealing with a bunch of proprietary communication protocols, we TCP/IP has wisely become the defacto protocol. Even if TCP/IP clearly has its shortcommings.
In the end the market will decide, that commoditized fileformats is the only way to go. With or without the help of Microsoft.....Anonymous
September 06, 2005
Although I promised you a summary of what I discussed with Microsoft last Friday, much of it's already been told - if not discussed. Like CRN's Paula Rooney, I got the chance to connect with Microsoft's Alan Yates (GM of...Anonymous
September 06, 2005
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September 06, 2005
Well, I haven't been using MS Office in years and my productivity has only boosted. Using LyX I can write and let the computer take care of the layout. LyX'es format is plain ASCII. Pretty portable as far as I am concerned. It is quite small as well. My documents are printed in PDF, PostScript, ASCII, HTML. It works quite well for me. I don't have any crashes, my documents aren't bloathed and images stay where they are. I remember that being very different with MS Office.
Open Office I use only when having to work in an MS environment. Productivity is about the same as with MS Office, I don't see any significant difference (apart from the crashes).
All in all, I don't think Massachusetts will fail as some suggested. Take a look at the many posters here: http://blogs.pcworld.com/techlog/archives/000857.html
They didn't fail! I guess some of the posters here never worked with OO.o or any FOSS software for any length of time. I have. Over five years it is now. It was like someone gave me my computer back. And this brings me to my final point.
It isn't and never has been in the interest of Microsoft to relinquish control on any aspect of their product portfolio. So why should they now? As a matter of fact, all you see lately if quite the reverse: productkeys being checked all the time, constant changing of SMB to shake off Samba. And Microsoft has a nice history to go with as well, remember Novell, Stack, DR, etc. etc. The list is endless..!
I trust you once, I trust you twice, I don't trust you anymore. Beware of Romulans bearing gifts...
HansAnonymous
September 07, 2005
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September 07, 2005
Brian, if you truly do not understand what is wrong with the Microsoft Office 2003 XML Schemas license in the context of government procurement contracts, you might take a look at my in-depth analysis at <http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20050330133833843>.
In summary, Massachusetts would violate the international Agreement on Government Procurement should it approve Microsoft's restrictive license.Anonymous
September 07, 2005
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September 08, 2005
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September 08, 2005
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September 12, 2005
>>> We are going to provide bulk upgrade converters that allow you to easily convert from the binary formats into the XML formats
Are you going to provide full documentation for those formats, in case Massachusetts decides to stop using MicroSoft products?
Are you going to ensure there are free programs for reading and writing those documents, so as to avoid barring poor people from interacting with their government?
Are you going to ensure that the format will be wholly free of IP entanglements, so the state can use its information to interact with its citizens as it sees fit?
Unless you can give a hearty "Yes" to all of those questions, it really doesn't matter what your new format is going to be like---it will not be what the state needs or wants.
Get used to it - it's likely other governments will follow suit.Anonymous
September 12, 2005
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September 13, 2005
Interesting how I see all these cries about the supposed lost productivity when moving from Office.
While it's true that VBA won't work outside of MS Office, most government offices have those features turned off (and remember the macro virii?)
But back to the point, I was recently at a site and the secretary (who had been using MS Office for years) had an issue with MS Word switching to a greek symbol font (or automatically translating the text to greek symbols instead of english characters) it wasn't a font issue alone, since switching the font to Arial just gave square blocks.
The answer, (which increased her productivity)?
Open Office 1.9 (Beta for 2.0) I set the default save as to MS Word 97 and she's been able to work again. This was in an office that employes (I am just a consultant, so I have more lattitude) a lot of Microsoft Certified Master Degree and above software people and they all had problems with resolving this (how much $$$ lost, estimate over $2000 of time as her documents had to continually be redone, the time that was taken from other projects to help resolve her problem, the CEO of the company berating her for breaking the perfect MS Word program).
If the switch for 90% of the people is as smooth as I have seen it, I don't know how Microsoft is going to cope. It's a losing proposition. It took me 5 minutes to get her documents fixed in Open Office.
So how is this a problem again?Anonymous
September 22, 2005
Thanks for the anecdote Vlad. It's hard to comment directly on the issue you reference since it's not clear which version of MS Office you are referring too. We've done a lot of work to make it really easy to format a document, but as a result, people can often introduce functionality that they didn't intend to. That's most likely what happened with the document in question. We've done a lot of work around trying to make it easier to "debug" a document as well as prevent folks from getting into this situation in the first place which is why I'm curious to know what version you are referencing.
Kadin, while there are a number of very vocal folks here who probably won't be inviting me over for dinner anytime soon, there actually are a ton of people who love the work we've been doing to open up our formats and support their schemas in our applications. Of the thousands of people who read this blog entry, less than 1% felt the urge to post a negative comment. It's a lot easier (and definitely more fun) to post a negative comment where you disagree with the author though than it is to post something in agreement.
Paul, have you read through the information about the XML formats? All of your questions have already been answered. Yes we fully document the formats and make that documentation freely available. Yes there are free viewers and editors (it's just ZIP and XML). Yes we freely license the formats and the IP behind the formats.
For folks who are more interesting in the licensing details, I just posted more on that topic here: http://blogs.msdn.com/brian_jones/archive/2005/09/22/472826.aspx
-BrianAnonymous
September 26, 2005
The comment has been removedAnonymous
October 03, 2005
"The reason I say that there hasn't been thorough research is that we won't have our first Beta for another couple months, so I doubt they could have looked into it much."
That must be true - how can there be thorough research into your product, if you don't have a product? Customer's fault, for sure.Anonymous
October 09, 2005
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October 22, 2005
It's pretty amusing to see MS squirming when their brute force tactics no longer bring everyone to their knees.
Wake up and smell the coffee Brian. Have you been living in a cave? MS is probably THE most hated/untrusted company in the world. And this is just another example of why.Anonymous
December 01, 2005
I work for a publishing company, and we're already using the new Office XML formats to speed up our process considerably.
Open Office has its place in many venues; however, many companies will continue to benefit from full-featured Microsoft products over their open-source couterparts. I am by no means a Microsoft apologist, and I could care less what Massachusetts does, but I think we can all agree that the MS bashing is beyond trite at this point.
So take all your passe comments and bashing to some Open Source board where the people who read it might actually care. I read this blog to find information about developing MS products for my job - by the way Brian, more documentation for InsertXml is needed. Specifically, regarding the insertion of a combination of WordML with a custom schema into a structured WordML/our-schema document (it seems to change the XML)?
So, everyone else who apparently has all this time on their hands: go have a LAN party or play D&D or something. Busy people have work to do.Anonymous
June 23, 2006
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