Quote:
Originally Posted by GreenMonkey
I'm an IT worker, I understand the difference. The problem is finding progams that are compatible to open such files, given a few generation skips.
|
And that takes us right back to the proprietary nature of those files. Open formats can have open source implementations, which can then be ported to new platforms in the future. Proprietary formats usually need proprietary programs, which often need to be run in an emulated environment because they will never be ported to future platforms. This is the true danger of using Office, or WordPerfect, or whatever application that outputs to proprietary formats. At some point in the not too distant future, those documents will be lost. Imagine if that document is your hospital's record of birth, or city's record of deed to your property. What happens when such important records are no longer readable?
Personally, I don't care if people prefer to use Office or some other proprietary application to write documents, as long as the documents are saved in an open format that anybody can read and write. Only then will our data be guaranteed to be accessible in the future.
Encrypted files are just the ultimate example of a proprietary format just waiting to be unreadable (which I think is the main point of them for the publishers).