Slashdot reports that Microsoft has released the specifications for their binary office productivity file formats. Translation: projects such as OpenOffice can now see how Microsoft encodes .doc, .xls, and ppt. Bad news: the file specifications are so overly complicated it is not likely to save on previous efforts to reverse engineer these formats.

While certainly the open source community and open standards advocates can't get excited about the usefulness of the specifications, it is an indication of the positive influence promoting and fighting for open standards is having.