On Tue, 2002-01-01 at 08:51, robin wrote: > Dave Sherman wrote: > > [cut] > > >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. And if anyone DOES reverse-engineer the file > >format, then MS can sue them to smithereens, and even try to go for a > >prison sentence, since their EULA will carry the force of law. > > > I can't seriously see this happening. Microsoft had enough political > and economic clout to survive getting sued by Netscape et al., but they > don't have the clout to sue Sun - it would be suicidal.
Maybe. But they *could* sue OpenOffice.org, and probably shut it down, which would effectively slow, if not stop, development of StarOffice as well. > I suspect the real reason for the paucity of .doc filters is that it is > such a yucky format that writing a good filter is more trouble than it's > worth. wv does a passable job but is far from perfect, and even Star > Office only got it right with version 6.0. It is a yucky *and* an undocumented format. This means it requires anyone to reverse engineer it before they can write a filter for it. If you check the OpenOffice.org website, you will see that they were forced to re-write the MS Office filters from scratch, because the StarOffice filters were under an NDA from Sun. It wasn't because of MS licensing, but Sun itself was standing in the way (this may, on second thought, be a carry-over from Sun's purchase of StarOffice from the German Star company that originally developed the software). But here's another scary example, to which Civileme alluded: Samba. What will happen if/when UCITA passes in Washington state, and Microsoft sues the Samba team for reverse-engineering their proprietary software and network protocols? If we are lucky, Samba will be able to continue working outside the US, in one or more countries that are willing to largely ignore US extradition requests (or more accurately, that are so difficult to deal with that MS won't even bother). And any US-based Samba developers will need to leave the team, because MS can go after them individually -- again, for both monetary compensation and imprisonment. One need only look at Adobe's ridiculous actions with regard to Dmitri Sklyarov to realize that MS will not hesitate to try the same thing with any known Samba developer that they can reach. > >Civileme's further point, to which Doug balked, was that we should all > >be looking to move away from MS' (or anyone else's, for that matter) > >proprietary file formats, as a pre-emptive move so that we are not > >locked into yet another MS monopoly if/when UCITA passes. In our own > >self-interest, we should be changing to open file formats, like xml > >(which StarOffice 6.0 uses, by the way). > > > We need .doc filters as a stopgap. No matter how often I tell my > colleagues that I refuse to read .doc files, sometimes I just have to. > XML is a reasonable lingua franca, but for my own purposes, I'm still a > LaTeX man. I agree that we need the filters for now, but it would still be wise to stop using MS' proprietary formats ASAP. As far as using LaTeX, is there a free and easy to use LaTeX editor/"word processor" for Windows and Macintosh? Just curious -- actually, I thought LaTeX was a document layout/markup language for professional publishing, but not something typically used for word processing. I am betting you need to convert your documents to a different format for others (non-Linux users) to read, yes? Dave -- Do not meddle in the affairs of dragons, for you are crunchy, and good with ketchup.
Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
