While Office 12, Microsoft's next-generation desktop suite, is not expected to hit Beta 1 until later this fall, Microsoft officials are set to show off a number of its components at the company's annual Professional Developers Conference in mid-September. Recent developer conferences have focused almost exclusively on operating system and tools futures. But this year's will include dozens of tracks aimed at Office developers and users.
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Member since:"'m not a Team99 member or an MS Employee. Funny how my "disinformation" is backed up with links to the documents showing that the MS format is open, but your claims such as the license saying you can't use a certain development model is nowhere to be found. "
You sure act like one.
The very license pages you linked to contain the problem language of Microsofts proposed license, something along the lines of "You may not sublicense or relicense". That means the formats may not be used by an opensource application, because the very way that opensource is developed means that others can add to the original code - means that anyone must be able to use the format without going back to Microsoft for permission.
This is a very long standing principle in any "open standard". It is fundamental to it being a standard, and open.
There is also a huge potential problem with patent encumberance on Microsofts XML schemas, resulting in the probability that you must have Microsoft's permission to use any tools just to acces your own document data if you save that document in a Microsoft format originally - and Microsoft will refuse to allow you to use any non-Microsoft tool.
Here, maybe this person can explain it to you, since you are obviously a very very slow Microsoft fanboy who has trouble following the simplest of things.
http://www.dwheeler.com/essays/why-opendocument-won.html
Member since:2005-07-06
There is zero issue with patent encumberence any more than there is with PDF. The patent rights given and the circumstances under which they are given are virtually the same.
1) Open Source does not equal GPL (and even GPL applications are not excluded). There are other open sources licenses that could be used wouldn't issue any additional rights over those provided by MS.
2)The license refers to the implementation of the format importer/exporter. That code alone could be licensed seperately under the MS license while the rest of the project code is licensed under GPL.
The link you included is inaccurate as is the eWeek article it links to. Again, the licenses make no reference to the implementor.
Member since:
2005-07-06
I'm not a Team99 member or an MS Employee. Funny how my "disinformation" is backed up with links to the documents showing that the MS format is open, but your claims such as the license saying you can't use a certain development model is nowhere to be found.
.doc doesn't have to be publicly documented for there to be patents that apply to it. If this is the case, as I said, OOo is already encumbered (unless Sun's cross-license allows for it that is). WRT MS' supporting WP conversion, how do you know that 1)WP has patents on the format, 2)MS doesn't have a cross-license with the makers of WP. There were also a lot less legal obstacles to reverse engineering at the time it was made.