Open Up to Open Formats
,----[ Quote ]
| Vendor Lock-In
| Proprietary formats, such as DOC and MP3, are dangerously common. While
| almost everyone on the planet uses these formats to save and share their
| data, the formats themselves are not in the public domain, but belong to
| corporations (in these cases, Microsoft and Thomson Consumer Electronics (et
| al.), respectively. Admittedly, this doesn't usually pose much of a problem
| in the short term. Songs you ripped to MP3 ten years ago still play just fine
| on your current player, and you can still open Word docs you created in the
| early '90s. The trouble comes when you – or the company that owns the
| format – decides it's time for a change.
|
| Case in point: This year, Microsoft has decided to introduce a new format,
| Open XML (aka DOCX) which it has declared the new standard for Word files.
| Immediately, a schism broke open. While almost everyone on earth is still
| using the older DOC format, many who upgrade to Office 2007 unwittingly began
| using the new format (set as the default for Word 2007), which is unreadable
| to their colleagues without the use of a conversion utility. Time spent
| fiddling around converting file formats means lost productivity and lost
| revenues for businesses, governments, and end users who didn't think there
| was anything particularly wrong with the old format.
`----
http://www.maximumpc.com/article/open_up_to_open_formats
Stallman talks about such issues in CERN.
[Talk] "Ethics and Practice of Free Software"
,----[ Quote ]
| Richard Matthew Stallman is a software freedom activist, hacker, and software
| developer. In September 1983, he launched the GNU Project to create a free
| Unix-like operating system, and has been the project's lead architect and
| organizer.
`----
http://indico.cern.ch/conferenceDisplay.py?confId=17556
|
|
