Office 2007 UI License 281
MikeWeller writes, "Microsoft has recently announced a new licensing program for the Office 2007 user interface. This page links to the license and an MSDN Channel9 interview about the program (featuring a lawyer). The program 'allows virtually anyone to obtain a royalty-free license to use the new Office UI in a software product. There's only one limitation: if you are building a program which directly competes with Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, or Access (the Microsoft applications with the new UI), you can't obtain the royalty-free license.' What does this mean for OpenOffice? Will traditional menus/toolbars hold up to an ever-increasing number of features, or will OO be forced to take on a new UI paradigm? With the gap between OO and MS Office widening, how is this going to affect users trying to move between the two platforms?" You need to sign the license before you can get the 120-page UI implementation guidelines, which are confidential.
how about prior art? (Score:5, Informative)
http://quanta.kdewebdev.org/screenshots//shot2.pn
http://quanta.kdewebdev.org/screenshots//shot13.p
Do they need a license too?
Re:The myth of Windows GUI consistency. (Score:5, Informative)
But MS violate their own standards by creating custom widgets for Office and IE. This is something widely criticized by UI designers.
However, usually the WinAPI widgets are the core of Windows GUIs (tweaked buttons, menus
However, nowadays GTK and Qt have little custom quirks of this sort. Their differences are mostly optical (but it is a visual inconsistency when 90% of all apps are Qt/KDE-based and only one program uses GTK). However, the presence of two major TKs is a problem because distros tend to choose only one of these two. In this case you end up with a dependency that may be big enough to turn users and more importantly distro makers away (like "oh no, my system is purely GTK-based, I dont want Qt anywhere").
Re:I think the courts have made it pretty clear (Score:5, Informative)
From the announcement:
"For those that want to build their own UI that takes advantage of our design guidelines, they will need a license."
Re:The myth of Windows GUI consistency. (Score:1, Informative)
Why? The Win32 API's widgets are pathetic. Basically, they do slightly more than Windows 3.1's widgets did, and nothing more.
At the very least, most Windows programs implement their own menus, toolbars, buttons, tab boxes, scrolling panes, status bars, text input areas, and often a huge list of weird custom widgets that no other program uses (like the URL box in most web browsers, or even simple things like a directory listing). The default widgets are unusable, and hideously ugly. About the only widgets that are used without major modification are checkboxes, radio buttons, and scroll bars (the parts that don't do anything).
Windows can't even manage a consistent text editor field. Standard editing shortcuts (like Ctrl+Backspace, or Ctrl+Del), or even standard features like the insert toggle, cut and paste and undo are not implemented consistently across applications, or even within one application.
There is basically no consistency. The only case where you get ANY consistency is where developers imitate the latest Microsoft GUI.
At least in X GUIs, the base toolkits (commonly Qt and GTK) provide a rich set of powerful widgets, almost completely negating the need for a developer to ever feel tempted to write their own.
Re:how about prior art? (Score:2, Informative)
Stealing ideas has gotten them this far... why stop now?
Re:I think the courts have made it pretty clear (Score:2, Informative)
What Microsoft has done here is offer to component vendors the right to build third-party components to mimic the behavior in it's entirity. It is correct that Microsoft is not giving out any code, but to these vendors that isn't material anyway as they all have functional prototypes if not products at this stage. Microsoft has "blessed" them to release their implementations and given them access to the usability information they determined during their testing phases as well as the explicit behaviors that the Office implementation adopts.
Re:What gap ? (Score:3, Informative)
If you want details :
Paragraphs numbering : MS Word. Most people here are using old canvas where numbering works. I asked to one guy how it was achieving it. He did tenths of tries clicking everywhere until it worked. Couldn't get a straightforward procedure. Out of curiosity, launched OpenOffice.org 2.0 at home. Did what seemed straightforward to me (selecting 1.1 scheme in bullets and numbering), almost same place as in MS-Office, and it just worked.
Locks : MS Excel. Import an XML file. Close Excel. Try to delete the directory in which the XML file belongs to. Doesn't work. XML file goes away but not the directory. AFAIK only two solutions : reboot MS-Windows or restart excel and import another document in another directory, to move the lock.
Document corruption : MS Word. It implied the integrated drawing tool. Just before crashing, funny things happened. I was writing in a text box and the text would be written to another text box at the same time. Seems two objects had the same index...
While I'm at it : Why does an Acces DB always grow, even when you're removing entries ?
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
Re:so, what this seems to say (Score:2, Informative)
three letters: XML [microsoft.com]. have you ever tried to generate an excel document with charts without using an office object? can't really be done in a secure (read: won't potentially crash your IIS box) manner due to needing office installed. in an environment where reports (excel, ppt, word) are generated by a site this is priceless.
Re:how about prior art? (Score:3, Informative)
The new Office UI dynamically changes based on what you're doing. The ribbon starts with some common (and buried) features for the task you're working on (like changing a font). As you use it, the ribbon drops what you use infrequently and presents new choices. This is nothing like Quanta, and it's clear you haven't used Office's new UI at all.
That's not to say it's a *good* UI. I personally have had a rough time getting used to it. But comparing it to stuff like Quanta makes no sense whatsoever.
Re:so, what this seems to say (Score:3, Informative)
have to say that I'm not allowed to do that? I would argue, none at all."
And you would probably be the winner of that lawsuit.
A good example of this is when Jeep sued GM based on GM copying the grill used in the Jeep Cherokee for the Hummer H2.
Jeep lost that lawsuit. The Hummer H2 sold great. Now Jeep has an SUV that looks a LOT like a mini Hummer.
The moral of the story: A corporation doesn't concern itself with hypocrisy. It lives for one reason online: to be an engine of profit. If Microsoft using that defense against apple helped Microsoft make profit, it was the right thing for the company to do. If this caveat in their gui license helps them make profit, again, it is the right thing for the company to do.