Thanks to Chris for pushing forward on this topic.
I'd say that this was an enormously significant data point; we had always assumed that there was no access to the specs because they were proprietary and of commercial value. To discover that they don't exist either on paper or in the form of institutional expertise for one of the world's biggest software development companies is perhaps surprising, but helps us retune our expectations and to be more confident in our recommendations.
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Les Carr
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From: Repositories discussion list [[log in to unmask]] on behalf of Chris Rusbridge [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: 26 November 2012 10:56 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Response to my Open Letter on obsolete Microsoft file formats
You may remember the Open Letter I wrote a few weeks ago to Tony Hey of Microsoft, asking that they publish the specifications for older file formats. I was very pleased with the responses I received; thousands read the blog post, and around a hundred left comments, almost all in support of the idea. I'm pleased to say that Tony has replied, sadly with some bad news (they don't have the specs, nor any known in-house expertise in them) but also with some good news (they would like to work with the community in solving the resulting problems). They are suggesting working towards some licence options that would work for archival use, and also possibly crowd-sourcing a specification.
The response and my initial thoughts (which go a bit further) are at http://unsustainableideas.wordpress.com/2012/11/26/response-open-letter-obsolete-ms-formats/.
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Chris Rusbridge
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