- cross-posted to:
- hackernews
- cross-posted to:
- hackernews
LibreOffice has been on the offensive lately, taking the time to call out Microsoft and its practices whenever it can. Now, it is at it again, accusing Microsoft of “intentionally” using “unnecessarily complex” file formats to achieve user lock-in with its Microsoft 365 (Office) documents.
For those who don’t know, XML is a markup language that programs like Microsoft 365 and LibreOffice use to structure and define documents.
As LibreOffice puts it:
An XML schema comprises the structure, data types and rules of an XML document and is described in an XML Schema Definition (XSD) file. This tells the PC what to expect and checks that the data follows the rules. In theory, XML and XSD together form the basis of the concept of interoperability.
The two office suites take very different paths here. LibreOffice uses the OpenDocument Format (ODF), an open standard meant to be controlled by no single company. This format gives us files like .odt for text and .ods for spreadsheets.
Microsoft, on the other hand, created its own Office Open XML (OOXML) to support every feature in its own software, giving us the familiar .docx and .xlsx. What’s interesting is that both formats are really just ZIP archives. The easiest way to verify this is to take a .docx file, rename it to .zip, and decompress it. This will show you the guts of a Microsoft 365 document.
As LibreOffice notes, XML is supposed to function as “a bridge,” but Microsoft is weaponizing its own schema by making it so “complex that it becomes a barrier rather than a bridge.” LibreOffice compares it to a railway system where the tracks are public, but one company’s control system is so convoluted that no one else can build a compatible train, making it almost impossible for others to compete. Passengers don’t realise they are being held hostage by these technical hurdles.
The docx and xlsx formats are still soo much better than it was during the Word Perfect days. You had to pay so much attention to which version of each program you were using to transfer a file.
Yeah both those docs are basically a zip file with an xml metadata file and everything else as other ingestible data. While still shitty when its proprietary, definitely way better than the wild binary formats of old
I still have a bunch of these files sitting in my cloud and have to do the work to spin up old coreldraw versions in a VM just because I feel like preserving them as a hobby:
https://product.corel.com/help/CorelDRAW/540111130/Main/EN/Documentation/CorelDRAW-Wavelet-Compressed-Bitmap-WI.html
http://justsolve.archiveteam.org/wiki/Corel_Wavelet
Hah. Silicon era “in my day we had to walk to the fountain for water uphill both ways”. I see you, brother Old.
I should get WordPerfect 5.1 running in a DOSBox. The bluescreen nostalgia is a thing.
On topic, I’m surprised this is news now. It feels like it’s been a commonly accepted fact since the 90s. I don’t know what the conversation is supposed to do. If Google hasn’t been able to reverse this with an actually competitive alterantive I’m not sure the open source nerd community is going to make much of a dent.
Of course if it was up to Google there’d be no file format at all, you’d just have documents live in their servers, pay for the right to store them and never have an offline file to access beyond printing a PDF.
As a side note, I care less about format compatibility, but I would really appreciate it if LibreOffice switched the default text to white when opening a xls in dark mode. Doesn’t seem like it’d need Microsoft support for that one.
I feel like it is news because when Microsoft first announced the docx formats it was supposed to be a more open format compared to the binary ones of the past, but in the end they are back to their old tricks.
In the end? When they bribed the ISO into making OOXML a standard, what Office actually saved was incompatible with that standard on day one.
OOXML becoming an ISO standard was entirely to undermine the development of OpenDocument as an open standard. If they hadn’t done that, governments asking for open standards might have required OpenDocument. Now, since OOXML is an open standard, they’re immune from that even if they never bothered to implement that standard correctly.
But that was twenty years ago (again, I see you brother Old), and we all pretty much noticed immediately that all it did was cut out all the other software that could more or less deal with the old doc and xls stuff. In fact the switch to the X formats was one of MS’s usual slow transitions. A whole lot of people stuck to the old ones for a very long time for that exact reason until MS started cutting feature compatibility more aggressively.
It’s “news” in a geological sense, I suppose, but unless I missed a quiet refresh of Office’s proprietary formats I would say it’s a stretch otherwise.
The format isn’t static, and new versions of the standard have been released throughout the years. There are also separate definitions for each “app” - document, presentation and workbook.
The latest update however was for documents, v4 having been released in 2016, so 9 years ago. For presentations and workbook, the latest update was 14 years ago.
So yeah, we all figured that what MS was doing was mostly for show a long time ago, but it’s not like this is recent news at all…
I suppose it ties into the whole win11 migration hubbub, I expect they have a bunch of people trying out their software and wondering why the ms compat is sh*t.
I guess? The whole “Office is a big blocker for Linux migration” is a thing, particularly over here. Still, far from being a new thing. I’m not even sure that LibreOffice calling it out officially is a new thing.
Being ruthless like gates was in 90s