Microsoft publishes office 97 format

[red660]

Don't know if it's already been mentioned, but as of Feb-15-08..

Microsoft has formally published the specification to Office 97 format files.

http://www.microsoft.com/interop/docs/O ... rmats.mspx

Yes, that's right, you can download pdfs that fully specify the format of Word (.doc), Excel (.xls), and Power-point (.ppt) files.
This must surely be quite important, since there are many organisations that have legacy documents in Office 97 format.

Cheers,

Steve

[AndrewZ]

Years ago MS already released document for the same formats , but then they took it back. Since then, people either used copies of that old documentation or reverse engineered them.

[bobharvey]

I have my doubts about this publication of formats. As I read it they are freely available only for non-commercial purposes.

That means that any programme written to use it will have to charge for commercial use in order to pay licence fees to Microsoft. Since that is against the GPL, I suspect that the whole exercise is to backwater the GPL into hobbiest use only.

[AndrewZ]

Since that is against the GPL, I suspect that the whole exercise is to backwater the GPL into hobbiest use only.

IANAL, but I would think such a conflict could not have that result. As far as I know, you can't add a restriction (non-commercial use) to the GPL, so the software which wants to use it simply couldn't use it.

You may want to read Wikipedia's article on the MS OSP.

BTW, OpenOffice.org doesn't use the GPL.