CrunchBang Linux

aifrantz

Member

From: Malaysia

Registered: 2012-10-04

Posts: 18

Website

How open source tools read proprietary format

Hi guys

Clarification required for this - the "war" between the proprietary and open source - because I need to understand more about this.

Open source developers have no access to the source code for the proprietary / licensed tools. Take MS Office as the example. LibreOffice dev can't access the source of the MS Office and from that point, these devs are trying hard to guess the algorithms / codes / what-so-ever in order to display doc / docx document perfectly flawless in Libreoffice.

Same goes with nVidia I assume. Devs have no access to the code so it is a little bit hard to build a good open source graphic driver (the nouveau) compared to ATI where the documentations about the working mechanism of ATI easily accessible (is it?).

Thanks !

Last edited by aifrantz (2012-10-12 01:28:09)

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- Soul Research Society - NightlyArt - Necromancy -

rockon1215

Member

From: Florida

Registered: 2009-05-30

Posts: 31

Re: How open source tools read proprietary format

Doing a little test

cat filename.doc

(A professor required .doc or .docx for a paper) yields some gibberish followed by my entire paper in plain text (all on one line due to windows line endings not being linux line endings) followed by more gibberish.

Amidst the gibberish printed at the beginning I see some names of fonts, the word "body", and the word "Heading." At the end of the output I see the words "table", "summary information", and "word document"

From this I can gather that a basic .doc file consists of a a declaration of the font/fonts used, a declaration of the body, and a bunch of plain text that makes up the body.

If I wished to test further, I'd make a document in MS word consisting of only a header with some text and no body and see what the cat of that is.

Essentially, educated guess and check. At least that's how I would do it

As for graphics drivers, I have no idea

Last edited by rockon1215 (2012-10-10 04:48:29)

zalew

#! Junkie

From: Warsaw, .PL

Registered: 2012-03-28

Posts: 351

Re: How open source tools read proprietary format

devs are trying hard to guess

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_engineering

Same goes with nVidia I assume

yes

hinto

#! Die Hard

From: Cary, NC

Registered: 2010-12-08

Posts: 1,066

Re: How open source tools read proprietary format

RDesktop and RDP is an excellent example, too.
-Hinto

Last edited by hinto (2012-10-10 14:44:23)

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"Sometimes I wish I hadn't taken the red pill" -Me

aifrantz

Member

From: Malaysia

Registered: 2012-10-04

Posts: 18

Website

Re: How open source tools read proprietary format

Thanks to rockon1215, zalew, hinto... again, thanks for the information. I appreciate that

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- Soul Research Society - NightlyArt - Necromancy -

el_koraco

#!/loony/bun

From: inside Ed

Registered: 2011-07-25

Posts: 4,644

Re: How open source tools read proprietary format

Office OpenXML (used in MS Office) is an open standard, not a proprietary one. The formatting problems in LO are due to not fully adopting the standard, but that is inching towards completion.