Originally Posted by Saab Dastard
Well if MS were to release a native version that ensured document portability between Win / office and Linux / office it would very likely kill off the open source competitors just as it did with Novell and WordPerfect
Originally Posted by Saab Dastard
I'm not saying that this would be a good thing
Glad you're not, 'cos despite the superficial advantages, it would be a very BAD thing.
MS wants to be not just the boss, but the ONLY boss and history has shown that this is not good for anyone. Monopolies are bad for society for a whole host of reasons, which is why most countries have evolved laws to limit this.
For reasons that are somewhat obscure, Gates believes that the world should have only one OS (his), only one set of standards (his) and only one Office suite (his) and on the desktop at least, has come very close to achieving this. Not by merit much of the time, but by illegal anticompetitive behaviour, dirty tricks. and just paying the fines that an increasingly helpless community tries to use to control the company.
Imagine a world where the only place that you could buy commercial airliners was Boeing. What if Boeing controlled most of the patents on aircraft construction, most of the copyrights on design and all the international standards (secret, BTW and you had to buy a very expensive licence from them even to see the standards).
The battle now is not about operating systems, but standards. He who controls the standards controls the world. Having failed to get W3C to use MS's proprietary standards for the Web (which would have effectively allowed MS to control the internet), MS tried to subvert the Java language (used extensively on the Net). MS licenced Java (an open standard), added it's own proprietary extensions and tried to replace the open Sun implementation of Java with it's own closed and proprietary implementation. And so on.
The "recipe" for the .doc, .ppt and .xls file formats is secret MS stuff. No-one else can make easily applications that read and write these formats. The only way is reverse engineering (not illegal) and MS have deliberately made these formats hard to reverse engineer. The fact that many developers HAVE succeeded is phenomenal - it's amazing that compatibility is now around 98%.
And the MS formats change subtly with each iteration of MS Office - how many of you have found incompatibilities opening old documents? Of course MS wants you to drop Office 97 and move on & buy the next one.
The World is getting a bit fed up with this and the .odf Open Document XML standard has been developed - the standard is open, non-binary and free for anyone to implement. There is considerable impetus and adoption of this now, since governments and institutions are increasingly reluctant to entrust data to a closed proprietary format owned by a convicted American monopolist. MS's response has been similar to the Java debacle - they've developed their own MS-XML standard which is MOSTLY open, but contains proprietary closed binary extensions. They maintain it is "better" (for whom?), but the result is that documents created in the new MS Office format may not open or display correctly in non-MS implementations. MS is now trying hard to force MS-XML upon the world at the expense of open XML.
OpenOffice is excellent (and getting better all the time), but again, thanks to MS machinations compatibility is not assured 100%. Thanks to the State of Massachusetts (and other governments around the world), adoption of the .odf Open Document XML format is proceeding apace and very recently MS have finally agreed to produce an add-on to MSOffice that will allow opening and saving documents in the .odf format. MS have made this as difficult and clumsy as possible (you can't use .odf as the default format), but it's there!
The problem of drivers is still with us, but remember that Linux now includes support for a vast number of devices internally - you don't have to put in a CD or go off and download a driver from somewhere much of the time. As the momentum of Linux builds, more and more manufacturers are including or releasing Linux drivers. Some of these are closed binary drivers that are incompatible with the GPL, and purists shun them, but the more practical among is accept that there are sound reasons for this and install them anyway. I have drivers for all my gear on Linux and it all works - Vista, on the other hand does not have drivers for many of my devices (especially older stuff) and realistically these will never be developed - all the more so because Vista will not accept drivers that have not been signed by MS (and getting an MS signature for a driver is very expensive).
Yes, Linux still has some rough edges - it just isn't as slick as, say, XP (which I confess, I find a very stable and usable OS) - but these rough edges are quickly disappearing.