Re: Are the Microsoft Trolls Quaking with fear?

From: nessuno (nessuno_at_wigner.berkeley.edu)
Date: 03/16/04 

Date: 16 Mar 2004 14:45:10 -0800

Sybren Stuvel <sybrenUSE@YOURthirdtower.imagination.com> wrote in message news:<slrnc5cd7u.avt.sybrenUSE@sybren.thirdtower.com>...
> nessuno enlightened us with:
> > Meanwhile, it seems to me that Microsoft could do a lot more than they
> > have been doing to throw obstacles in the way of anyone trying to make
> > software interoperate with Microsoft products, for example, Word file
> > formats that Open Office must duplicate.
>
> I hear people talking about replacing Word documents with PDF more often
> these days. One of the advantages: it can be opened on any computer, and
> it's a view-only format.
>
> Sybren

Dear Sybren,

The problem is that people always send you Word, Excel etc files, want
you to fill some form out, and send them back. It annoys me that
people just assume that you have MS Word (especially bureaucrats), but
they do. So you really need to have some software that can handle MS
file formats, like Open Office. If MS does implement their "Trusted
Computing" (with the help of hardware vendors), my understanding is
that they could go to encryped file formats that no one could open
without MS software. I don't know realistically how serious a threat
this is, but the web site I quoted above talks about it (Google
Palladium+Windows).

In short, if you want to run a Linux desktop for real business or
government applications, something like Open Office is vital. If Open
Office weren't free, I'd be glad to pay for it, since it's a really
useful product and it had to be boring and frustrating trying to
reverse engineer the MS file formats.

Going back to a topic above in the thread, the news today is that the
EU could fine Microsoft anywhere between 100 million and 1 billion
Euros. The lower figure is close to what MS paid SCO, so that clearly
is a small matter for them in the war against open software.

Nessuno

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