Friday Thoughts 12-01-2006

re: Friday Thoughts 12-01-2006

I'm Brian Jones — Fri, 08 Dec 2006 04:42:14 GMT

hAl, the covenant actually hasn't ever mentioned future versions of Office formats. It's something we've publicly said we would push to do, but you can't have legal covenants based on things that don't exist. Suffice to say, the current formats are open and everyone can use them. If for some reason Microsoft moved away from using those and started adding proprietary stuff, then I doubt people would use those things (or they would rightfully scream at us to open them up). :-)

Przemyslaw, when you say they are fast, do you mean the compression algorithms are fast? Or do you mean it actually makes it faster to parse the XML? We haven't found that the compression/decompression times have much of an impact on the overall load and save times. The parsing of the XML itself though once the decompression has occured does take up a bit of time.

-Brian

re: Friday Thoughts 12-01-2006

Przemyslaw Skibinski — Thu, 07 Dec 2006 13:07:23 GMT

Have you thought about using specialized XML compressors like XMill (http://sourceforge.net/projects/xmill) or

XML-WRT (http://xml-wrt.sf.net)? These XML compressors are very fast (LZ77-based) and highly improve compression comparing to zip/gzip or Microsoft CAB.

re: Friday Thoughts 12-01-2006

hAl — Thu, 07 Dec 2006 10:44:23 GMT

I might be wrong.

They changed the covenant to reflect that it wil be made available for the Ecma Internatonal standard. Not sure when as the page has no datetime stamp.

I thought it would have (also) said something about future versions of the formats in general.

Might be wrong there but it seems important that the statement reflects all future version of the format MS uses in it's Office suite as those might not always be exactly the same as the standard at that particular moment. Office could be ahead of standardization or use MS only extentions on the current standard.

re: Friday Thoughts 12-01-2006

I'm Brian Jones — Thu, 07 Dec 2006 03:20:23 GMT

hAl, what are the changes you've seen? I'm not aware of any changes, but I can definitely find out.

-Brian

re: Friday Thoughts 12-01-2006

hAl — Wed, 06 Dec 2006 16:13:36 GMT

Brain, could you please explain why Micrsoft has changed it covenant not to sue and removed the clauses concenring future versions ?

This seems a serieus breach of trust towards the people relying on the promises made by Microsoft. It also makes the legal analysis on the covenant that you cited from in an earlier post completly worthless.

Why has Micrsoft changed the covenant and why isn't this mentioned on the page containing the covenant itself ???

re: Friday Thoughts 12-01-2006

WTF Chuck — Mon, 04 Dec 2006 17:57:30 GMT

Just going over the news here on Monday and I see that ODF has achieved final ISO standardization. You've posted in the past about Open XML and ISO and I'm wondering how that's going. I'm guessing the ECMA standard will be final real soon now(tm) so congrats on all the hard work.

Also, I get laughs every day on digg on slashdot with all the "open" people attacking this thing here and am wondering were all the supporters are? Am I the only one who can comment about how ODF is just as patented as Open XML and how this spec can be freely downloaded?