.doc viewer/reader

[Alex Martelli]

"M.-A. Lemburg" <mal at lemburg.com> wrote in message
news:39A6FC07.6F78290F at lemburg.com...
> Ulf Engstrøm wrote:
    [snip]
> > anyone knows of any open source projects in any language doing this? Or
some
> > kind of spec on how the .docs are saved?
    [snip]
> These two are OSS:
> http://www.winfield.demon.nl/index.html
> http://www.wvware.com/wvInfo.html
>
> And there are more... the problem with the above two is that they
> are GPLed and any application linking against them would have
> to be GPLed too.

Yes.  A non-GPL'd application wanting to read Word files would have
to package up the word-document-reading functionality into a separate
GPL'd component and talk to it via Corba/ILU/SOAP/COM/whatever --
RMS is on record as saying that such "arm's length" communication
does not spread the GPL to other components chatting with the GPL'd
one, but I think that's pretty clear anyway.

Another interesting legal-ish issue is raised by the second webpage
you mention...:
"""
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. Since then they have been removed, 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. CD Number 2 of the three
part set. The specs that were made available were the office 97
spefications.
Not the previous versions.
"""
So MS can't claim trade-secret protection for those fileformats, having
published them freely in the past.  I'm pretty sure I must have Jul '98
MSDN CD's around *some*where -- but, also, that I'm surely not
allowed to distribute copies of materials contained in them (trade
secret may not apply, but copyright surely does).  Wonder what made
them offer that information then later retract it...!


Alex