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How proprietary formats have become Microsoft’s main tool for lock-in

blog.documentfoundation.org

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Re: How proprietary formats have become Microsoft’s main tool for lock-in

#121

Post by rleigh »

inigyou wrote: post #74
rleigh wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been developing open source software since the late '90s. I was a Debian developer for nearly 15 years. I stopped actively participating in this stuff about 10 years ago. I'm involved in a few libraries and that's it. The "Linux" ecosystem is utter chaos, and there are too many developers who are their own worst enemies. There's too much churn, and too little strategic thought. Compatibility is king. Microsoft k…

You can fix it by making a Linux ecosystem that isn't chaos. I'm pretty sure Apple proved that compatibility isn't the end-all-be-all of customer satisfaction. It was useful to Microsoft at a certain point in time. But what people actually care about is getting their stuff to work right now , not being stuck in the past. We now tend to run old software in VMs or just old hardware rather than trying to make it work on…

As I said, no individual has the capacity to fix this.

When it comes to compatibility, different companies and groups make different tradeoffs. Last week, I had to use a (brand new) datalogger. It came with a CD, and instructions for installing on Windows 98! And yet, it worked flawlessly on Windows 11. Looked dated, but perfectly functional. Can you imagine a third-party application from 1998 working on a contemporary Linux installation, or a Mac? Of course not, it's almost impossible to do this. Like it or loath it, Windows will run software from 35 years ago without trouble. It's not just about big office suites, it's about the thousands and thousands of useful tools that it will run without complaint, and that's what has made it so indispensable even while they continue to make it increasingly awful.

Apple made a different tradeoff, where compatibility is not guaranteed. It might be fine for a few years, but no one is using software from a 1998 Mac on a modern Mac, it just won't run. It's one of the reasons the Mac ecosystem is so limited, since there just isn't that huge backlog of material.

And Linux is that on steroids. The incompatible churn in libraries, tools, system services, windowing systems, it's both relentless and counterproductive. How many years will your software work until it breaks. Is it even possible to run on more than one blessed distribution in the present day. Linux is great, and it's a great platform to develop on. But it's an absolutely cursed platform to distribute software for.

Developers run software in VMs. Most people do not.

Re: How proprietary formats have become Microsoft’s main tool for lock-in

#122

Post by frollogaston »

cube00 wrote: post #105
inigyou wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> employee Oh well that changes things. Use whatever your boss tells you to use, they're the one paying for it.

> Oh well that changes things. It's the same for any case where someone sends you something and wants it sent back with changes. If you screw up their files it's never going to go well for you (family, friends, volunteer groups). Nobody will ever thank you for messing up their work because it's now saved in an open format. If they end up using a feature that triggers the format nag screen they'll likely end up saving…

Or dealing with any professional service that isn't your day job. Like oh you need to fill out some legal documents, the fields use something proprietary in Word that they can't just convert to PDF...

Re: How proprietary formats have become Microsoft’s main tool for lock-in

#123

Post by frollogaston »

inigyou wrote: post #86
leonidasrup wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Foreign government officials choosing Microsoft is not always the result of Microsoft been the best option. Sometimes, little bit of bribing helps. "Microsoft is paying more than $25 million to settle federal corruption charges involving a bribery scheme in Hungary and other foreign offices." https://apnews.com/article/f6852284a2154ac5ab422d51495c4056 Trump government now makes bribing more useful. https://apnews.com…

That and marketing. Libreoffice is like buying a Honda Civic, I guess? It works, it's boring, it's cheap, nobody ever sees it advertised on TV. Many people see the ads for cars on TV and go and buy the expensive sexy car they saw on TV and don't shop around.

My wife and I are still sharing a copy of Word '07, guess that's like a used Nissan Altima without insurance

Re: How proprietary formats have become Microsoft’s main tool for lock-in

#125

Post by rjnz199 »

ariamailclient wrote: post #62
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are they? They extended DNS, LDAP and Kerberos to make Active Directory so that now every Microsoft-locked corporation is stuck using Microsoft as their internal DNS. They do the various things they do to get everyone stuck using their email instead of any other standard IMAP/SMTP/webmail provider. Azure is "somehow" one of the three major cloud providers.

Truth be told, IMAP & SMTP are wildly obsolete in today's needs. Have a look at this: https://jmap.io/

[dead]

Re: How proprietary formats have become Microsoft’s main tool for lock-in

#126

Post by fsflover »

applicative wrote: post #115
okanat wrote: post #42

I think TDF tries to push a wrong narrative here for their lack of engineering and funding. Competitive products like Google Docs, WPS or Euro Office solve proprietary file format problem very nicely. Microsoft themselves had to solve that exact problem for Lotus 1-2-3. Proprietary file formats are an industry standard. It is the lowest resistance way to deliver features and you cannot blame your competitor to have m…

It violates elementary, ABC, read-it-in-Rousseau principles of legitimate state operation if government documents of any kind whatsoever are in a proprietary format. This is why EU courts forced .docx on Microsoft. .doc files were found to be simply invalid binary blobs with no meaning whatsoever in a democracy. I dimly remember a US court - maybe Minnesota? - tending to the same. It was only the magical atmosphere i…

> This is why EU courts forced .docx

This was not so straightforward at all, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standardization_of_Office_Open...

Re: How proprietary formats have become Microsoft’s main tool for lock-in

#127

Post by inigyou »

applfanboysbgon wrote: post #107
inigyou wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are a lock-in tool but they are also completely natural and available to everyone. Have you ever written any software that saves files? Is its file format proprietary? Some are more complicated than others, but I'd bet dollars to donuts you didn't make your format an ISO standard. At best you wrote some Markdown explaining it broadly (and some of your code has drifted so that is incorrect now), at worst maybe yo…

> One time I tried to write Doom for a platform, from scratch. I got the 3D BSP renderer working and could move around a space with walls. I was looking for reference for how to implement the rest of the game and didn't find it. I didn't realize you're supposed to port Doom to a platform by starting from the original Doom code and not by writing it from scratch, because the only detailed enough reference is the code…

Do you understand that it isn't id software who ported Doom to all those toasters?

Re: How proprietary formats have become Microsoft’s main tool for lock-in

#129

Post by [deleted] »

inigyou wrote: post #127
applfanboysbgon wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> One time I tried to write Doom for a platform, from scratch. I got the 3D BSP renderer working and could move around a space with walls. I was looking for reference for how to implement the rest of the game and didn't find it. I didn't realize you're supposed to port Doom to a platform by starting from the original Doom code and not by writing it from scratch, because the only detailed enough reference is the code…

Do you understand that it isn't id software who ported Doom to all those toasters?

[deleted]

Re: How proprietary formats have become Microsoft’s main tool for lock-in

#130

Post by m4rtink »

noir_lord wrote: post #64
m4rtink wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So lets have all your data vendor locked in a cloud somewhere so that the corp runnning it can milk you for ever or just decide to delete it all on a whim ? Perfect!

There is an entire generation who have grown up with the cloud and just see that as the default because it is. Which isn’t to say that everyone in that generation thinks the cloud is the sensible way to do it or that prior generations didn’t (it wouldn’t have “won”). My boy only understands what a file system is because I explained it to him, all his tech (with the exception of his gaming PC) might as well be magic b…

That's the whole problem from my point of view - we have a whole generation that don't really know anything other than these centralized magic black boxes.

That's very dangerous, as it gives a lot of easy to missuse power to the few people actually running these centralized black box services & their victims will not be able to do anything about it due to lack of knowledge how things actually work & viable alternatives.

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