| ▲ | okanat a day ago |
| 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 more features or hidden features in their formats. ALL strongly competitive software for the desktop workstations have proprietary formats: Autodesk, Altium, Adobe, Corel, Apple. All of them serialize their featureset on their own format since it is the easiest to do. FOSS won't get the marketshare pie by complaining about it. LibreOffice has to provide feature parity before complaining here and TDF needs to find the funding source to hire the engineers to achieve that. They need to have convincing arguments and consistently delivered features. Otherwise it will not get adopted. Microsoft hasn't actually selling their product on the premise of proprietary file format support. They sell it with the promise of total platform integration for every single software an office needs. You not only get an office suite but IT Admin tooling integrates with the computers and the office suite, e-mail management, SSO and licensing management software and Cloud storage all in once. To compete with the Microsoft (or Google Workspace) you need to be selling all of that at a very competitive price. Otherwise all private companies and many government departments will continue to choose Microsoft. If a change is wanted in the government, governments need to start investing Microsoft levels of money in hiring engineers. |
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| ▲ | mangecoeur a day ago | parent | next [-] |
| This is not true. In my company I decided we would not depend on Microsoft products. We use kSuite that offers everything MS does, ~90% cheaper. The one real problem we run into is PowerPoint decks that look different or get corrupted when used across different Office suites, including ones that are focused on Microsoft compatibility like OnlyOffice. Proprietary formats are a clear lock-in tool, because the cost of dealing with incompatibility is higher than the cost of paying the piper. (Although me being stubborn I made claude rewrite the OOXML to behave, but that's an absurd thing to need to do!) If open formats were the standard and could be reliably exchanged, it would remove a big reason to ever use Office products. |
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| ▲ | inigyou a day ago | parent [-] | | 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 your code isn't even commentated. And even when the basic format is documented, the important details rarely are. If you're making an Office competitor you have to render fonts pixel-perfect to how Microsoft renders them, or you'll wrap lines at different places and the cascading differences will inevitably put some element like a floating image in a different location than it's meant to be, messing up the document. And yet, does Microsoft document how they render fonts in so much detail that you can code it identically? No they don't - the only detailed enough spec for that is the code itself. Once I wrote a custom Minecraft server from scratch. The client-to-server protocol was well documented. It was straightforward to make a grid of blocks and let the player place and destroy blocks. But as soon as anything detailed enters the picture, it's game over for accuracy. When you break a block in Minecraft it turns into a "dropped item" entity, which you can pick up. The dropped item has physics. The client predicts the physics. If I didn't precisely emulate the client's physics, then the entity would glitch up and down as the client predicts it falling down and the server says it's still in its original spot, or fell down a different amount. The only detailed enough reference is the code itself. 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 itself. One time I tried to write an N64 emulator. I downloaded all the documentation I could find and got writing. My emulator ran a large portion of Mario's startup code and then I got stuck without enough information to proceed. I didn't realize that most N64 and later emulators are ports of existing emulators because they've been battle-tested and - say it with me - the only detailed enough reference is the code itself (or a real N64 which I didn't have). Basically working code is working code and you can never replicate it precisely without either years of work or actual copy-pasting. Even protocols designed to be reimplemented many times have inconsistency problems. Look up HTTP Request Smuggling if you haven't already. More benignly, see the controversy on JSON comments. The innovation of PDF was that it precisely specifies the font and layout of every element of the document, trying to leave nothing to chance. There are still differences between PDFs in different viewers but they are much less important than the differences in a Word document because the PDF specifies the exact placement of every character, because Adobe knew it wouldn't be possible to rely on word-wrap algorithms being identical. | | |
| ▲ | amiga386 21 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > I'd bet dollars to donuts you didn't make your format an ISO standard. What matters to me, if I'm communicating with my government (or vice-versa), is that they only use recognised standards. I will need a web browser, email client, document editor... but not a specific web browser, email client, document editor. This takes effort from governments, because the vendors of all the products they consume want to try and leverage their government connection to get lock-in and thus make their products mandatory for everyone in the country. For example, even if government developers only use Chrome browser and neglect to test on Safari, you can end up with millions of Safari or iPhone users unable to perform legally essential tasks, and have no workaround. The same is true for using proprietary office document formats, and that includes Adobe when there's a difference between PDF-as-specified versus PDF-as-implemented-in-Adobe's-proprietary-software. The importance of standards is that they tell every vendor exactly how to conform and not-conform to the standard. Hence the standard itself has to be made be robust. Hence why a standards committee has to own it, not a proprietary vendor. If it's a proprietary format undergoing standardisation, the standardisation's job is to file off the rough edges and make it interoperable. It doesn't take some fragile code that only works in one way, and say "that's the standard". It throws out the fragile bullshit like Microsoft's broken date handling that they don't even bother to fully document in OOXML. For comparison, a better standard and standards body (even though they have their own problems e.g. being dominated by Google) would be HTML5 and WHATWG. Everything is carefully specified so that all browser vendors can implement a standard, identically. That even includes things like word-wrapping (a small subset of document layout!), and there are test suites to catch deviations from the standard. | |
| ▲ | mangecoeur 21 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I have written software that saves files and saves to standard geopackage formats. Microsoft is known to have a lot of inconsistencies between its spec and reality. One important part of adoption open standards formats is that when you have real interoperability and competition between consumers of the format, the spec needs to actually work. HTML and the welcome demise of Internet Explorer specific markup through real competition in the browser space is a case in point | | |
| ▲ | inigyou 21 hours ago | parent [-] | | We can see from Fediverse that the spec still isn't really good enough. You have to code against Mastodon's code and Akkoma's code and GoToSocial's code. If you code against the ActivityPub/ActivityStreams spec, it won't actually work in the real world. Same with most protocols. HTTP is followed closely enough, but forget about even strictly spec-compliant SMTP. Protocol specs are more like statements of intent. |
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| ▲ | delta_p_delta_x 21 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > There are still differences between PDFs in different viewers Most obvious when viewing PDFs in Adobe Reader versus in Chrome's built-in viewer. The former has subpixel anti-aliasing. The latter doesn't. | | |
| ▲ | cozzyd 19 hours ago | parent [-] | | I think it's better now but PDF viewers used to ignore the interpolation method for bitmaps, resulting in colormap histograms turning super blurry depending on how they were saved. Oh and 0 width lines... |
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| ▲ | applicative 18 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | It doesn’t matter that you like them, a democratic state must burn them all utterly the ground. No state document in a proprietary format has legal significance. This was obvious before but it now settled law across most of the world | |
| ▲ | applfanboysbgon 20 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > 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 itself. This is the greatest misunderstanding of a programmer's job I've ever seen (by someone who apparently programs). Of course you don't write a game from scratch every time you port it to a new platform. You aren't even really supposed to be "referencing" the game code. The game code is built on a series of abstractions over the hardware. You swap in a set of abstractions for different hardware. If the game is properly encapsulated, you may not even need to touch what would be considered the "game" code rather than the engine code, or only minimally to update API boundaries. eg. Layer 0: Hardware Layer 1: OS Layer 2: DirectX Layer 3: Engine code, has functions like Draw3D(params) which call DirectX functions Layer 4: Game code, which calls Draw3D(params) If you swap in OpenGL for DirectX, you simply change engine code so that Draw3D calls OpenGL instead of DirectX as appropriate, and the game code is still just happily plopping along with the exact same Draw3D calls ignorant of whether those are being served with DirectX or OpenGL. This applies all the same even if Layer 2 is a software renderer, as Doom's was. Ditto for OS layers or anything else. If you want to reverse engineer it from scratch for learning, have at it, but why in God's name would you think that's what porting entails? And even after you understand porting is not about writing from scratch, you should understand that this has no relevance to your overall point. I'd also note that it is possible to reverse engineer a game from scratch without ever referencing the original source code -- that's called a decompilation project, it's intensive and time-consuming work, but it can be done. |
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| ▲ | amiga386 a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Not so much TDF as Italo Vignoli I noticed this HN comment from four months ago and boy does it have his number: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47630474 > I'm confident the person who most wants to sabotage LibreOffice's success is Italo Vignoli. [...] Most of his blogs are about how awful OOXML (Microsoft Office's open standard) formats are [...] This is a self-sabotaging marketing approach. [...] And now I look at who authored this article. "2026-07-17 Italo Vignoli" |
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| ▲ | frollogaston a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| "Microsoft hasn't actually selling their product on the premise of proprietary file format support. They sell it with the promise of total platform integration for every single software an office needs." Idk, the entire reason I've ever used Office was because someone gave me files I'm afraid to screw up. |
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| ▲ | jimnotgym a day ago | parent | next [-] | | The reason corporations buy ms is exactly what you have in quotes above. Active Directory | |
| ▲ | inigyou a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | You could just open it in libreoffice, make your changes and send them back an ODT, see how they like it. Or demand a PDF and list out the things you want to change so they can change it themselves. | | |
| ▲ | cube00 21 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > send them back an ODT The formatting goes wonky or the macros stop working and you get the blame for doing something "weird" to the document everyone else managed to pass around just fine. As much as you're doing the right thing by using open formats, you still end up looking like the incompetent employee. No good deed goes unpunished. | | |
| ▲ | inigyou 21 hours ago | parent [-] | | > employee Oh well that changes things. Use whatever your boss tells you to use, they're the one paying for it. | | |
| ▲ | cube00 20 hours ago | parent [-] | | > 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 it back into the native Microsoft format anyway. | | |
| ▲ | frollogaston 14 hours ago | parent [-] | | 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... |
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| ▲ | 16 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | [deleted] | |
| ▲ | pessimizer 20 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > You could just open it in libreoffice, make your changes and send them back an ODT, see how they like it. We didn't, and have decided to go with someone else who costs three times as much as you do. It's a bargain after the dozen internal emails back and forth, the missed deadline, and the subsequent heated discussions with you that your ODT caused. We know they aren't as good as you are. |
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| ▲ | sigbottle a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Hmm - I think you mean to say that when interoperability is not a core constraint, then there won't be an incentive for an open standard. That's important because in plenty of other software - databases, OSes, compilers and binary formats, networks, etc. name your favorite CS topic, there is an open standard for it. You can either achieve interoperability by... achieving interoperability, or by dominating market share and edging the user's action space to solely stay in your ecosystem (change the action distribution of your user) that for all intents and purposes that it "interoperates with everything" means that, "since I bought entirely into this ecosystem, I interoperate with everything". So ultimately I agree with you, but to present it as a failure of objective engineering prowess on open source is weird. As you said yourself, it's clearly the network effects that prop the business model. And sure, gaining market share isn't a trivial task, but it's not engineering. I think framing it in the interoperability way is healthier - because it actually provides a potential new out to work towards, rather than this weird beration double-bind that frames Microsoft's approach as The Objective Way to do things. It's not and doesn't have to be. |
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| ▲ | leonidasrup a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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/article/fcpa-bribery-trump-antibribery-la... |
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| ▲ | inigyou a day ago | parent [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | frollogaston 14 hours ago | parent [-] | | My wife and I are still sharing a copy of Word '07, guess that's like a used Nissan Altima without insurance |
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| ▲ | applicative 18 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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 in which Microsoft and ‘tech’ must succeed that made this flat out obvious conclusion invisible. I remember beginning writing a pandoc writer the minute it happened but some bright young brain beat me to it. The XML if I remember, had manifold curiosa probably meant to impede other implementations, but it was real. My impression is that his complaints, which echo those of the doc period in detail, arise from users’ failure to adopt best practices. |
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| ▲ | preisschild 20 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| > Proprietary file formats are an industry standard. It is the lowest resistance way to deliver features Maybe, but I still disagree. What "game-changing" features are missing from document file formats (such as word processing documents or spreadsheets)? I'd prefer that format being an open standard with wide compatibility over those new features. |
