[Ipg-smz] no mention of formats, was: What happens when Linux keeps getting better and better?

[M. Fioretti]

December 20, 2018 7:44 PM, "Phil Shapiro" <pshapiro at his.com> wrote:

> ... We may have to soon start mining asteroids for new adjectives -- just to describe
> Linux.

one thing, no: THE thing that surprised me the most, this being a mailing list of
professionals mostly writing about technology, is that the ~30 replies arrived so
far are all for or against this or that operating system or hardware maker...

but so far I have seen no mention of open file formats, i.e. future-proofing one's
work. Personally, if something has the best hardware and user interface ever, but
"saves" **MY** work in formats that are not 300% open and fully usable/processable
with other independent software of the same category, it doesn't exist for me.
I won't touch it with a flagpole. Regardless of license and price.

Using writing as an example, I may conclude that Microsoft Word has the best user
interface ever, is 10x times faster than any other text/word processor... but if
it only saved in .docx format I would NOT use it, period.

Ditto for graphics, CAD, video etc. My work is mine, now and 40 years from now.
And I'm only talking full access here, not royalties or attribution. It is futile
to speak of copy-right, when the one who controls your ACTUAL right to copy (=IMPORT)
your files into another software is some unknown software developer who may have
stopped working (please note how the license of the software matters VERY little,
if anything, here) decades before.

If I switched OS today, to any other OS of YOUR choice, MY hard drive would remain
fully usable because it contains almost 30 years of files, but almost all (*) in
open, still fully usable formats, including ~20 years of email archive.
What about you?

Marco
(*) exceptions: files with math formulas for my thesis from the 80s, and a few
FrameMaker files I only saved in that format in the early 90s, before I saw the light.
 
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