On Tuesday 01 January 2002 01:38, you wrote: > On 31 Dec 2001 20:05:55 -0500, Michael Leone <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > >I think Civileme's point was that if/when the UCITA law passes in > > >Washington, USA, then Microsoft (headquartered in Washington) will be > > >able to make a minor change to their proprietary .doc/.xls/whatever > > >file formats, and it will be illegal for Sun or anyone else to > > >reverse-engineer that file format to create a new filter for their > > >competing office suite. > > > > Sun licenses the file formats from MS, don't they? They didn't > > reverse-engineer them, I thought. > > Nope, they are reverse-engineered. That's why it has taken so long for the > filters to reach their present level of quality (which is very good). Calling it "reverse engineered" is a little of a dangerous reach, (in my HUMBLE opinion), my guess is a lot of the info is from APIs released by M$, to allow third parties to be able to write macros and other programs that will work with M$ applications, the rest would be "obvious" to someone studying, say, word processor programing.
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