A Dutch non-profit venture capitalist firm has called for Microsoft to put all the older formats it used, and has recently disallowed the use of by the newer Office programs, to be put into the area of public domain. The reasons cited include the massive number of documents that have been stored over the years that those formats were being used.

The company, NLnet, states that the .doc, .xls, and .ppt formats should be released in their entirety, so that complete compliance with the format is possible by other programs which might be used to read, edit, and augment the multitude of files in those formats. The opening of the formats is urged for addition to the ODF standards, also known as ISO 26300.

In an article from ITWire, the mention is made of the standards problem that MS is having with the OOXML standard that it wants pushed into adoption. The article hints that NLnet could help influence that adoption as a quid pro quo for releasing the full specifics of the older formats.

also from that article

NLnet recently joined ECMA as a member to improve interoperability of future OOXML versions with the ODF standard. It says it was alarmed by the fact that “even the committee members do not get the real specifications of the file formats they are supposed to be re-encoding.”

Michiel Leenaars, strategy manager at NLnet Foundation and the longest sitting member of the Netherlands national standards body committee responsible for both ODF and OOXML, said: “Surely no-one can make - or judge - a decent re-archiving standard if the original file formats are unknown to them…Currently Microsoft provides part of the specifications under a non-disclosure agreement but these are vastly incomplete, illegible, and available only under very restrictive conditions - and therefore of little use to either standards bodies or to the software community. “

According to NLnet, there has been quite some controversy over OOXML in the so far unsuccessful standardisation process. Many of the technical issues still have to be resolved in line with compatibility requirements from a largely unknown format. It is concerned that “the continuation of the OOXML standardisation process without the actual specifications will result in serious misalignments and vast information loss for potentially tens of millions of customers (and former customers) from Microsoft.”

NLnet Foundation claims to be a widely respected private charity fund supporting open standards and open source worldwide that has actively contributed to Internet standards, open source projects and subsidiary or enabling activities such as the development of GPLv3 over a number of years.

Perhaps a little give and take would enable more people to benefit than the open hostility that usually surrounds these proceedings.

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[tags] document format standards, MS Office, ODF formats, OOXML formats, NLnet [/tags]