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[News] Article Explains the Dangers of Proprietary Software/Formats

  • Subject: [News] Article Explains the Dangers of Proprietary Software/Formats
  • From: Roy Schestowitz <newsgroups@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Wed, 11 Jul 2007 15:45:23 +0100
  • Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.advocacy
  • Organization: Netscape / schestowitz.com
  • User-agent: KNode/0.10.4
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

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