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Originally Posted by SecretMethod70
So, the problem with Microsoft is not that it is a monopoly per se. It is that improper government interference in the realm of information has created Microsoft. Were Microsoft's creativity to be a transparent technology, as it was in the past, it would be quite simple. People could still not re-publish Microsoft's works, but creating tools that can work alongside Microsoft products would be totally acceptable. In other words, the barrier to entry for OpenOffice.org - that the .doc format is the de facto standard and that OO.o can't guarantee 100% compatibility with it - would not exist. Just as it was legal to take apart the cotton gin and create a tool to work with the cotton gin, so too should it be legal and possible for competitors such as OpenOffice.org to create a word processor that can "work with" MS Word.
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Umm, it *is* perfectly legal for OpenOffice to read and write Word .doc files. File formats are not elligible for copyrights or patents (the exception to this is when file formats require complicated decoding or decompression algorithms to read, e.g. MPEG, and even then the patent is on the algorithm, not on the format itself). The reason that OpenOffice has problems reading .doc files is because the format is not *open*, which means that OpenOffice must reverse engineer the format. This requires a significant amount of work. Compounding that requirement is the fact that Microsoft drastically changes the format with each new release of Word. The only thing that keeps OpenOffice from being fully compatible with .doc (the are mostly compatible already) is the fact that they simply don't have enough manpower to keep up with Microsoft. There is no government regulation that you can remove to rectify this situation.