Comments on: Microsoft Stumble On Open Doc Standard

By: James

James — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 09:26:32 +0000

Well, I’ve not read through the specification myself (and don’t claim to be an expert on such things) – I’m only commenting on what I’ve heard from others in the open source community.

It is basically Microsoft trying to compete with the open source community. Open Document Format has already been approved, and there are a number of applications that use it (both open and closed source). By claiming it is “open”, Microsoft hopes to gain some of that support for their format. There is also the issue of patenting – by saying it is open, one would probably liken it to open source and therefore free of patenting, but I doubt that will be the case.

Like I said before, Microsoft should have helped to improve the already standardised ODF format, rather than try and develop their own standard, which I personally feel will ultimately fail.

By: Simon Perry

Simon Perry — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 09:08:06 +0000

I haven’t had the chance to read through the spec. If what you say is true, and they still have proprietary sections in there, you’d have hoped that they’d be happy to share the file format, then compete on the quality of the application that they deliver.

I guess it shows their lack of confidence in their ability to write the best app.

By: James

James — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 08:25:38 +0000

I can’t say I’m surprised. Microsoft’s document format isn’t even “open” – there are bits of it which are proprietary to Microsoft and this keeps vendors locked into agreements with them and the coins rolling into MS HQ. I’m glad that is has been defeated as we don’t need another “open” standard – ODF is good enough, and Microsoft could have helped to expand that (despite the obvious “oh, it’s open source – we don’t do that” argument).