Microsoft admits Swedish employee promised incentives for Open XML support
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As the ISO standards battle over Microsoft's Office Open XML document format moves into the final days before a Sept. 2 vote, the company admitted Wednesday that it offered "compensation" to Microsoft partners in Sweden for joining that country's national standards body and voting for OOXML approval.
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(InfoWorld) - Companies have completed the first phase of a Microsoft-sponsored project to create software that can convert Microsoft Word documents between Open XML and Open Document Format for Office Applications file formats. The Open XML Translator is now available for download in version 1.0 from SourceForge.net, a site that acts as an online repository for open-source projects. The software also can be found on Microsoft's Web site here and here. Microsoft funded the work on the translator, but did not contribute any code to the project, said Jason Matusow, senior director of intellectual property and interoperability at Microsoft. The company provided architectural guidance and management to the project, he said. A French company called CleverAge contributed the code and built most of the Open XML Translator, while Aztecsoft in India and Dialogika in Germany did the quality assurance and testing. The Open XML Translator allows Microsoft Word documents based on Open XML to be translated into ODF and vice versa, Matusow said. Once downloaded, it can be used as a plug-in for Microsoft Office 2007, the documents of which are based on Open XML. Developers also can build it into software they are developing. The Open XML Translator for Word documents is the first phase of the project. The team is currently working on translation between ODF and Open XML for spreadsheets written in Microsoft Excel 2007 and presentations developed in Microsoft PowerPoint 2007, Matusow said. Much has been made of the fact that MicrosoftÂ did not provide native supportÂ in Microsoft Office 2007 for ODF, though it provides support for 30 other file formats and uses Open XML as the default document file format. Matusow defends that decision by saying Microsoft tries to meet its customers' wishes, and there was no customer demand for ODF -- largely supported by rivals IBM and Sun Microsystems -- when development on Office 2007 began. IBM and Sun both use ODF as the default file format in their own rivals to the Microsoft Office suite. "A standard is about a stack of paper -- market adoption is the ultimate driver of activity," Matusow said. "What gets built and used is the defining element. That's why we look at the customer discussion as being so important." However, government customers that may be required to use only industry-standard technologies in their IT infrastructure requested that Microsoft provide a way to translate between Open XML and ODF.Â ODF recently was approvedÂ by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) as a global standard, while Open XML is awaiting approval. Matusow said the reason Microsoft let third parties be the primary creators and caretakers of the Open XML Translator is because of the input of government customers who wanted Microsoft to provide a free, open way to translate between ODF and Open XML -- one that was not strictly overseen by Microsoft but was more of a community effort. To its credit, Microsoft did try to include native support for another company's document format -- a standard implementation of Adobe Systems Inc.'s PDF -- in Office 2007, but Adobe balked at the idea and asked Microsoft to pull that support, which it did. Adobe recently submitted PDF to the ISO for global standardization, and Matusow said Microsoft would again be "open to conversation" with Adobe about including PDF as a native file format in a future version of Office.
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Regulators at the European Union have asked Microsoft for information on Microsoft lobbying on an ISO Open XML vote in September.
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Amid intense lobbying, Microsoft is expected to squeak out a victory this week to have its open document format, Office Open XML, recognized as an international standard.
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(InfoWorld) - No one used the 'L' word, but both sides in the Microsoft Corp. antitrust battle in Europe accused each other of lying about basic facts surrounding the latest twist in the long-running saga that emerged Thursday. The European Commission sent Microsoft a so-called statement of objections Thursday accusing the software vendor of failing to provide interoperability information on "reasonable and non-discriminatory terms." This was a requirement laid out in the landmark 2004 antitrust ruling against the company. In its statement the Commission said the software giant proposes overcharging for vital interoperability information needed by software makers to allow their products to work properly with the Windows operating system. It dismissed almost all of the information Microsoft proposed revealing as not innovative and therefore not worth the price the company wants to charge to license it. Competition commissioner Neelie Kroes said Microsoft had agreed that the innovativeness of the information should be the main criterion when setting the price, but in a conference call with journalists later Thursday, Microsoft top lawyer Brad Smith denied his company had agreed innovativeness should be the main criterion. "We told the Commission we believe innovation is one of three main elements. We don't have the same interpretation of what had been established [between Microsoft and the Commission]," he said. Then ECIS, the European Committee for Interoperable Systems, accused Microsoft of misleading journalists by citing a study by accountants Price Waterhouse Coopers (PWC), which, according to the software company, shows that the prices Microsoft wants to charge for licenses to the interoperability information are 30 percent below normal market rates. "It is an outrageous comparison," said Thomas Vinje, ECIS's legal advisor and a partner in the Brussels office of law firm Clifford Chance. "The PWC study compares the prices Microsoft wants to charge with the market price for much more valuable information such as software code, documentation, and full redistribution rights," he said. "What people will get with Microsoft's interoperability information is a lot less valuable. To compare it with the sort of information in the PWC study is like comparing apples with... some withered fruit," he added. The actual prices Microsoft wants to charge for licensing out the interoperability information are too complicated to share with journalists, Microsoft spokesman Tom Brookes said. He warned inquisitive journalists that there is no simple price list. The Commission believes that if all software vendors bought licenses it would amount to around 35 percent of the net profit of the industry. Microsoft's Smith dismissed this, saying: "I don't think you can conclude that." He said that if all vendors bought the licenses the total revenue Microsoft would earn would total around US$30 million -- a tiny fraction of annual software industry profits. "That $30 million figure bears no resemblance to reality, and if Microsoft can't explain how they reached this figure it has absolutely no value," Vinje said. Microsoft has four weeks to respond toÂ the latest statement of objections, after which it faces daily fines of up to â¬3 million (US$3.9 million). In the meantime, the Commission is expected to conclude its assessment of the substance of the interoperability information Microsoft submitted. It doesn't have to be innovative. In fact Microsoft's rivals, including ECIS, argue that much of the information competitors need in order to build their software so that it interoperates with the ubiquitous Windows OS on PCs is quite straightforward. Nevertheless, if it isn't revealed then rivals are stuck, Vinje said. Commission spokesman Jonathan Todd told journalists Thursday that Microsoft's continued failure to comply with the antitrust ruling is unprecedented. "In the 50 years of European antitrust policy, it's the first time we've been confronted with a company that has failed to comply with an antitrust decision," he said. "You have to look at their attitude faced with other antitrust authorities in other jurisdictions. This is a company that apparently does not like to have to conform with antitrust decisions," Todd added.
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Hot Swedish XML action Microsoft has been accused of rigging a vote on the ratification of Office Open XML (OOXML) as an international standard at a government body in Sweden.â¦
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Microsoft has made substantial concessions to the European Commission, finally bringing the company into compliance with a&#160;2004 antitrust ruling, the Commission said Monday.&quot;Microsoft has finally agreed to three substantial changes to bring them into compliance with the decision,&quot; the Commission said in a statement.Following the 2004 ruling, Microsoft paid a fine of &#8364;497 million (around $600 million) and published a version of its Windows XP operating system without a bundled media player. The Commission also ordered a third remedy, that Microsoft publish details of the communications protocols used by its server operating system products to communicate with one another and with its desktop clients.The Commission was initially&#160;unhappy with Microsoft&#39;s response&#160;to the third remedy, fining it an additional &#8364;280.5 million last year, but has now reached agreement with the company. One of the sticking points was how open source software developers could make use of the communications protocol information Microsoft published.The first change the company has agreed to is that open source software developers will be able to access and use the interoperability information, as required in the 2004 ruling.Second, the royalties payable for this information will be reduced to a nominal one-off payment of &#8364;10,000 and third, the royalties for a worldwide license, including patents, will be sharply reduced, the Commission said.
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PC Magazine - Opinion: Microsoft's open-source pledge is a good step.
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IBM has taken the lead in lobbying against the adoption of Microsoft's Office Open XML format. But it does support the format in a few products -- a fact that some Microsoft bloggers were happy to point out.
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SEPTEMBER 16, 2004 (IDG NEWS SERVICE) - Microsoft Corp. yesterday said it is looking to work more closely with developers of the Open Office open-source project.
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Microsoft is offering protection against patent claims for Office binary formats under its Open Specification Promise.
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InfoWorld - It may be Valentine&#39;s Day but there are no love letters being exchanged between duelling electronic document formats, ODF (OpenDocument Format) and Open XML. Instead, Microsoft, the backer of Open XML, took a public swing at ODF supporter IBM.
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InfoWorld - Microsoft is enlisting Linux distributor TurboLinux to help tailor work being done to translate documents between Open XML and ODF file formats for Japanese and Chinese users.
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Linux distributor TurboLinux is helping to translate docs from Open XML to ODF for Asian markets.
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Microsoft said on Friday that it has added Office binary formats to a list of technologies that are protected against patent-violation claims, answering criticism from some involved in the OOXML (Office Open XML) file-format standards process.The OOXML format is being considered as an international standard by the ISO (International Organization for Standardization), but translation between the original Office binaries and OOXML is necessary for there to be seamless document exchange between older versions of Office and Office 2007. Corporate developers and makers of other office productivity products need access to the formats in order to write converters between Microsoft&#39;s format and the possible standard.Microsoft has listed binary file format specifications for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint -- that is, .doc, .xls and .ppt -- under the OSP (Open Specification Promise). These file formats are the defaults in pre-Office 2007 versions of Office; Office 2007 was the first version to use OOXML as its default file format.Microsoft published the OSP in September 2006 as a promise that it would not take any patent-enforcement action against people who want access to the specs for technologies it has developed. Since then, Microsoft has been periodically adding to the list of OSP-protected specs, which can be found on the company&#39;s Web site. In a press statement, Microsoft said that adding the Office binaries to the list is to &quot;promote interoperability between the binaries and Open XML and make Office Open XML accessible to an ever-wider group of users and developers.&quot;The move came out of discussion in the ISO around OOXML as national standards bodies requested more open access to the Office binaries, said Brian Jones, an Office program manager, in a posting on a company blog last month.According to Jones, the specs for the binaries already had been available royalty-free via e-mail to anyone who requested them as outlined in an article in Microsoft&#39;s Knowledge Base. But since the national bodies were concerned with the steps someone had to take to get access to the binary formats, Microsoft -- working with an Ecma International technical committee, Ecma TC45 -- decided to make it easier for people to get them, he said.Microsoft has been working to fast-track OOXML through the ISO approval process through Ecma, another international standards body, since November 2005. Ecma approved OOXML in December 2006, but approval by the ISO has been more problematic. A final vote on ISO is expected in March after an ISO ballot resolution meeting for the OOXML format, scheduled for Feb. 25-29.To help companies build connectors between the binaries and OOXML, Microsoft on Friday also went live with an open-source project on SourceForge to create software tools, guidance and show how a document written using the binary formats can be translated to the current ISO spec for OOXML, ISO/IEC DIS 29500. The resulting translators will be available under the open-source Berkeley Software Distribution license, and members of the community are free to use the translators, submit bugs and feedback, or contribute to the project as they wish, Microsoft said.Translators already exist between the Office binary formats and OOXML&#39;s rival file format, ODF (Open Document Format), which already is an approved ISO standard. For example, the Sun ODF Plug-in for Microsoft Office enables conversion between Microsoft Office documents to and from ODF.
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Novell will support Microsoft Office's Open XML file format in its version of OpenOffice by the end of January.
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(InfoWorld) - Google, which has been less vocal than some on the furor surrounding the standards process for Microsoft's Office Open XML, came out Friday in support ofÂ the ISO's decision to reject the specification. In a post on its internal Google Code blog, Open Source Programs Manager Zaheda Bhorat said that the company agreed with the decision of the International Organization for Standardization not to approve the fast track of OOXML and listed some of the problems company engineers have with the format. The ISO voted earlier this month to reject an attempt by Microsoft to use another standards body, Ecma International, to fast track its XML-based file format OOXML through the process to become an international standard. The process was riddled with complaints that Microsoft placed people sympathetic to its cause in key voting positions toward the end of the process in an attempt to swing the vote in its favor. The company's decision to submit OOXML to Ecma and then the ISO has been controversialÂ as ODF (Open Document Format), which many rivals support, already is an ISO standard for XML-based documents. In fact, one of the problems Bhorat cited for why Google disapproves of OOXML is that it is incompatible with ODF. Other reasons Google supports the ISO decision are that the company believes there was not enough time to review the specification; there are undocumented features of OOXML that prevent implementation by other vendors; and dependencies on Microsoft proprietary formats and technical defects makes OOXML difficult to fully implement, according to the blog post. "Technical standards should be arrived at transparently, openly, and based on technical merit," Bhorat wrote on the blog. "Google is committed to helping the standards community remain true to this ideal and maintain their independence from any commercial pressure." Bhorat also used the post to stump for ODF, which Google supports in its Web-based office applications. IBM, Sun, and other Microsoft rivals also are vocal supporters of ODF. "With multiple implementations of one open standard for documents, users, businesses, and governments around the world can have both choice and freedom to access their own documents, share with others, and pass onto future generations," Bhorat wrote. Issues raised by Google and technical experts about OOXML during the voting process are set to be resolved at an ISO ballot resolution meeting been scheduled for Feb. 25-29, 2008.