Advocating FDL University-courses

[Jan Wildeboer]

Imran Ghory wrote:

> Instead of bothering to have the above arguement, you could have 
> just fired up a webbrowser and spent a few seconds on google to 
> turn up http://www.wvware.com/.

Did that, clicked on the link called "Informations and links" under 
ressources and found this:


| The MS Office file formats (Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Office Binder and
| Office Drawing) were all made freely available from the MS msdn
| website in 1998.

Sounds good :-)

| Since then they have been removed,

Sounds bad :-(

| but MS made cd's available of their website to developers that
| registered to receive them. These cd's are commonly available.
| The particular cd that the specifications were made available
| on is the July 1998 edition.

So we can only hope that the specs didnt change after that. Can we also 
be sure of that? Is redistribution of these specs allowed?

| CD Number 2 of the three part set. The specs that were made available
| were the office 97 spefications.

So not the Office 2000 specs?

| Not the previous versions. The specs are quite hard to read, and often
| incomplete.

Sound bad :-(

| Some fields are wrong, and some information is not fully correct, but
| theres nothing better available.

As a result I conclude:

- Actual specs are NOT available
- Specs that are available are seemingly not open and outdated
- The implementation seems to differ from the specs making them more or 
less obsolete

So IMHO the MS-Office formats are not transparent but opaque according 
to the FDL.

Jan Wildeboer