osOpinion: The Ultimate Lock-In
March 12, 2003 - 10:27pm — bmann
I said some nice/hopeful things about the next version of MS Office and XML formats. Well, I might be completely wrong, according to an osOpinion article entitled The Ultimate Lock-In.
The first is the possible DMCA implications of trying to open Office 2003 documents without Microsoft's blessing. Just as Dmitri Sklyarov found himself in a world of trouble for writing software to break Adobe's encryption for its E-Book format, developers who write software that will open "protected" Office 2003 documents may find themselves facing criminal charges under the DMCA.
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Comments
OTOH...
People posting to this Slashdot article about a similarly negative article say basically, that these articles are full of it & the Office2003 implementation of XML is perfectly good.
Maybe not that depressing
... the divestiture of AT&T and the unbundling to PSTN switches and interfaces (billing, datanses, order systems etc) is a good precedent.
A proprietary MS document is like a packet that cannot be parsed by a switch.
So perhaps it can be regulated that the format be an open specification.