OpenOffice Blesses Microsoft-Novell Pact

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November 03, 2006 (5:32 PM EST)

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By Gregg Keizer , TechWeb Technology News

The Microsoft-Novell pact was welcomed Friday by OpenOffice.org, which said it's delighted as long as the deal leads to improvements to the group's free open-source applications suite.

Microsoft and Novell announced their pact on Thursday. It includes patent protections, support cooperation, and co-development agreements. Among the latter is a promise to improve interoperability between Microsoft's Office and Novell's distribution of OpenOffice.org, the free business application suite.

"We're going to be building translators between Microsoft Office and OpenOffice to ensure that we have interoperability, compatibility at that level," promised Jeff Jaffe, Novell's chief technology officer, during a press conference Thursday.

OpenOffice.org welcomes that goal. "We'd be delighted to see that," John McCreesh, the marketing project lead of the open-source OpenOffice.org group, said Friday. "We're very keen for anyone to make enhancements, as long as they benefit everyone."

Novell, said McCreesh, has been an exemplary open-source development partner, and has fed improvements and changes it's made to its version of OpenOffice back to the suite's code base. "I'd expect them to continue doing so," McCreesh said. "If they use Microsoft funding to do that, we'd be even happier."

OpenOffice.org and Microsoft Office have been at loggerheads as some governments have argued this year and last that the proprietary document formats of the latter lock them into using Microsoft's applications. Instead, agencies in the U.S. and Europe have argued that an open-source document format should be dominant.

"Microsoft's recognition of OpenDocument means they understand that people want to own the information they've made with [Microsoft] Office products," said McCreesh, who called the Novell deal a win for open-source.

Microsoft acknowledged Friday that the move was made to answer just those kinds of calls by customers.

"We heard from customers and governments that they wanted strong document interoperability between Office and OpenOffice," said David Kaefer, Microsoft's general manager of intellectual property and licensing. "The debate was always about an either/or choice. Should everyone use ODF [OpenDocument Format] or should everyone use Microsoft Office [Open XML]?" said Kaefer. "But users don't have to choose one or the other."

The deal with Novell, said Kaefer, will focus initially on an ODF-Open XML translator for Microsoft Word, but similar tools for other applications in the suites, such as their respective spreadsheets, would be addressed later. A timeline for the release of the translators hasn't been set. "We expect that by Jan. 1 we'd have a clear idea about the timelines," Kaefer said. "This will certainly be [a project] of months, not years."

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