MS to support Opendoc format

[W1nTry]

I guess this is good news to the Open Sauce community.

Microsoft will support Open Document

Volish Backdowns of our time


By Nick Farrell: Thursday 06 July 2006, 13:50

SOFTWARE GIANT Microsoft has decided to end its opposition to OpenDocument and will back the standard for its forthcoming Office suite.
According to reports, Vole has agreed to develop tools that enable conversion between its Open XML formats in Office 2007 and OpenDocument.

A beta of the Open XML translator for Word 2007 will be hosted on SourceForge.net sometime today. The translator will convert .docx Word documents to .odf and vice versa. Not only that, it will be available under the BSD open source license. Vole says anyone can submit bugs and contribute to the project.

The final tool will ship at the end of 2006, with converters for Excel and PowerPoint around early next year.

It is not clear why Microsoft has changed its mind after spending a great deal of time and money fighting OpenDocument. It is possible that the outfit has been having to deal with lobby people from the various government organisations that want to adopt OpenDocument, but want to keep using Office.

[richjob]

*loud watery steups*

This is the kind of shizz you have to do when you fuXXor your customers who ask for unemcumbered nonproprietary formats.  Customers react to fuXXors by specifying ODT which you specifically didn't want to support, because OpenOffice.org, Koffice, Abiword and StarOffice all have better native support for ODF.

People not buying yuh shit sight unseen again, Steve.

And they not taking blackmail and bribery either.

[TriniXaeno]

sounds good to me.

Supporting OpenDocument could hurt sales of MS Office going forward but Microsoft has made enough money on their Office product as is. Talk about a cash cow.

I'm excited to see little or no difference between an OpenOffice document and an MS Word. It is already pretty close with OpenOffice 2.0

[W1nTry]

Update:

Microsoft takes open source short cut

Open Sauce when it suits it


By Nick Farrell: Tuesday 11 July 2006, 08:00

WHEN THE champion of proprietary software Microsoft needed to build its new Open Document format plug-in it seemed happy to take Open Source code to run it.
The code, which was nicked from the OpenDocument Fellowship, converts ODF to HTML. It was written by J. David Eisenberg. Vole has jacked the code under the bonnet of its ODF plugin, which is licensed under the BSD license.

After years of telling its punters that its code is much better than Open Source, Vole seems to have done a backflip, but the release under a BSD licence has got some Open Saucerers wondering if that is legal.

Groklaw, for example, has asked Eisenberg what he thinks of Vole's use of his code under that licence.

He said that he was just pleased Microsoft were using it, even though he was not world's biggest fan of BSD, as it allows proprietary commercial use of freely-given software. µ