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Comment by xvilka | Hacker News Reader

Why require only proprietary format? It's a pity they wouldn't allow ODF.

Office Open XML (docx), to be fair, is a non-proprietary standard. Microsoft has been forced into that by the EU; and they keep messing with it, but it is actually technically "open".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Open_XML

It is open only on paper - at least half of it MSO-specific compatibility cruft, plus real documents often contain binary blobs that aren't described in the standard. Name "open" is a lie in this case. Moreover, it's made in ISO only because of corruption of these standardization bodies. It wasn't even properly reviewed!

Seems to work in LibreOffice, which is open-source just fine.

It's completely unrelated. LibreOffice can open most completely binary DOC or XLS as well, they were just reverse engineered. It has nothing to do with openness.

Correlation does not imply causation. The fact that Libreoffice can open binary proprietary formats does not automatically imply that all formats it uses are binary and proprietary. DOCX is an open standard.

DOCX is not an open standard, there are many articles[1][2] why it isn't - even in Wikipedia article [3]. ISO standards committee were just a rubber stamp Microsoft puppets to ensure vendor lock for decades.

[1] https://osswatch.jiscinvolve.org/wp/2007/01/05/criticism-of-...

[2] http://www.robweir.com/blog/2007/01/how-to-hire-guillaume-po...

[3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standardization_of_Office_Op...

I stand corrected, sorry. Emulating some other proprietary software really shouldn't be a paragraph in something we call an "open standard". Thank you for the links.

Due to decades of work reverse engineering the behavior of MS Office (not only after the invention of DOCX, many of the specified behaviors in DOCX reference behaviors of older versions of Office).

It would be a monumental effort to create another implementation and completely impossible without referring to MS Office as a reference implementation.

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