Massachusetts ditches Office

[iMeowbot]

Not to get too political but... that's a joke, right?

It's true! And right across the river from its capitol is the People's Republic of Cambridge!

 

[iMeowbot]

So Apple's standard text editor can open Microsoft proprietary format, but Microsoft's own standard text editor cannot open their own format? Wierd...

THey do include a second editor called wordpad that does an acceptable job.

 

[wdlove]

It's true! And right across the river from its capitol is the People's Republic of Cambridge!

Many of the citizens are very proud of that title.

 

[dubbz]

Others, including Microsoft and software industry groups, have criticized the state, saying its decisions narrow choices to open-source products.

No one is stopping makers of proprietary software to implement OpenDocument.
It's their own damn fault if they don't.

On the question of why Adobe's PDF format meets the definition of "open format," state officials said it was a "gray area" but that Adobe's legal and licensing terms were deemed sufficiently open.

Agreed. There's a host of applications, both free and non-free, that can read and write PDF. There's alternatives on both Mac and Linux if you don't want to use Adobe Reader. I'm pretty sure Adobe has released specs for the format, much unlike Microsoft's Word .doc.

 

[DZ/015]

Many of the citizens are very proud of that title.

As someone who is employed in Cambridge, I must agree! Or, in the words of dogman, Arf Arf! (If you frequent Mass Ave., you know what I mean)

 

[Lord Blackadder]

Open formats are a good thing.

This is the future. Hopefully.

 

[GFLPraxis]

sarcasm there?

no .doc wont work with MS Works for example, or WordPerfect, dont even think Notepad can open it, but i could be wrong there.

Yes you can open it in wordpad, but you get a bunch of goobley gah with no formatting and a bunch of symbols where things like font changes are supposed to be. It's barely legible.

 

[RacerX]

I'm pretty sure Adobe has released specs for the format, much unlike Microsoft's Word .doc.

The PDF spec is totally open for anyone to use with only a single license restriction... that being that if someone modifies the PDF file format they can no longer call the files "PDF" and can not use the ".pdf" extension.

I can tell you that this license restriction is aimed directly at companies like Microsoft. In the past Microsoft as modified standards like Java, HTML, MPEG4 and XML so that they are no longer standards compliant and only work with Microsoft products or on the Windows platform. And in all other cases Microsoft continued to use the standards name after the modifications were made even though the new formats no longer were really part of the standards. Microsoft used this technique of polluting cross application and cross platform standards to keep users locked into a Microsoft-only solution.

Given Microsoft's history in this area, Adobe's license restriction is not only understandable... it is completely welcome!

It should be noted that when Apple started work on Mac OS X after Rhapsody, one of the two main goals was to remove many of the license restrictions that had made NEXTSTEP/OPENSTEP/Rhapsody so expensive (the other goal was to create Carbon).

While the foundational OS components that were removed were replaced with elements from FreeBSD (as well as OpenBSD and NetBSD), on the GUI side Apple removed Adobe's Display Postscript (which would have run the user at least an additional $50 per copy of Mac OS X). They replaced Display Postscript with Display PDF (a major part of Quartz) made using the PDF specifications.

According to my experience, you are correct on everything except for this. I've developed some php applications that generate XML Excel files that can be read by Office on either Windows or OS X, that include almost any Excel function. Maybe the Word version of XML has some special commands that the Mac version can't read?

I don't use Office or Office formats, but when Office 2003 was released, one of the most notable aspects of it was that it's default formats were not compatible with Office 2000, Office 2001 or Office v.X. And at the time Microsoft had not decided to use the same Office document format in their upcoming Office 2004 release.

I haven't followed Office 2004, so it very well could support the XML based formats now.

Microsoft's main goal was to attack the Office 97/2000 format which is what so many other applications support. It is not just in an attempt to get rid of competing apps, it is also in an attempt to force users of older versions of Office to upgrade even if they have no other reason to.