Microsoft Opening Office XML Formats

sriram_2001 writes "Microsoft has opened up the XML schemas for Office 2003, thereby silencing a lot of criticism. This could potentially open the way for several government contracts as certain governments have made open standards (and not open-source) a pre-requisite. In their FAQ, Microsoft not only says that open source developers can distribute software built using them, but also that they'll make all future updates available using the same terms. Here is the Official Microsoft Site and CRN and Techworld have stories about it."

Nope, too little, too late. :)

[caluml]

No, no matter what they do, we'll still hate them, right? :)

Nooo...

[sandstorming]

Just when you thought you could escape clippy the office paperclip through open source...

Wait....

[bizpile]

...does this make them Communist sympathizers?

Great

[savagedome]

open source developers can distribute software built using them, but also that they'll make all future updates available using the same terms

My area code is 666 and I just looked outside. It's completely frozen too. Yup.

Ok....

[gral]

and how much does the Version that creates these "Open" formats cost? Isn't the version that creates these formats the "Professional" version only. Oh wait, OpenOffice.org does these already. :-)

Re:We won!

[Anonymous Coward]

First of all, why is this a loss for Microsoft? Unless of course you are implying introducing OS policies to be a poor business decision.

Secondly, it's lose, not the reference to your mother.

Thirdly, spelling Windows with a $ sign at the end is not big, clever nor vaguely amusing.

And lastly, you are an idiot.

An agrarian view on MS XML format

[Anonymous Coward]

Plowing for several large companies, I'd always done my work on Windows. Recently however, a top online investment firm asked us to do some work using FreedBSD. The concept of having access to source code was very appealing to us, as we'd be able to modify the kernel to meet our exacting standards which we're unable to do with Microsoft's products.

Although we met several fertilization challenges along the way (specifically, FreedBSD's lack of Token Ring support and the fact that we were unable to defrag its ext2 file system), all in all the process went smoothly. Everyone was very pleased with FreedBSD, and we were considering using it for a great deal of future internal projects.

So you can imagine our suprise when we were informed by a labourer that we would be required to publish our source code for others to use. It was brought to our attention that FreedBSD is copyrighted under something called the GPL, or the GNU Preventive License. Part of this license states that any changes to the seed are to be made freely available. Unfortunately for us, this meant that the great deal of time and money we spent "touching up" FreedBSD to work for this investment firm would now be available at no cost to our competitors.

Furthermore, after reviewing this GPL our labourers advised us that any products compiled with GPL'ed tools - such as gcc - would also have to its source code released. This was simply unacceptable.

Although we had planned for no one outside of this company to ever use, let alone see the source code, we were now put in a difficult position. We could either give away our hard work, or come up with another solution. Although it was tought to do, there really was no option: We had to rewrite the code, from scratch, for Windows 2000.

I think the biggest thing keeping FreedBSD from being truly competitive with Microsoft is this GPL. Its mercurial requirements virtually guarentee that no business will ever be able to use it. After my experience with FreedBSD, I won't be recommending it to any of my associates. I may reconsider if FreedBSD switches its license to something a little more fair, such as Microsoft's "Shared Source". Until then its attempts to socialize the software market will insure it remains only a bit player.

I welcome you for your time.

Exactly...

[Futurepower(R)]

Welcome to Microsoft Palavra! (TM)

Yeah but...

[Spy der Mann]

what about the BINARY formats?
What's the matter, MS? Chicken? ;-)

Re:Nooo...

[bwalling]

Just when you thought you could escape clippy the office paperclip through open source...

Shows what you know - we're talking about XML, whereas paperclips are made of metal.