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A comment on Jury in Oracle v. Google finds in Google's favour. Parent comment

Re:Jury in Oracle v. Google finds in Google's favour by jonathankoren on Friday May 27, 2016 @01:34AM (#11784102)
Nope. The formats were completely undocumented. Nothing outside of Microsoft could properly import the formats. Sure things tried, but they inevitably always failed in rather dramatic ways.

Joel on Software had article about the file formats several years ago. Apparently big chunks of the files are basically just memdumps. http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/02/19.html

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Re:Jury in Oracle v. Google finds in Google's favour by tajen on Friday May 27, 2016 @03:08AM (#11784412)
I know a guy who worked at Microsoft and left to create a .doc reader for some other software. He said the .doc format wasn't even documented inside Microsoft and pretty much no-one could tell you how to parse it, apart from trial-and-error.
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