• 14th_cylon@lemmy.zip
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    16 hours ago

    it will be up to opinion in the end.

    no, it will not.

    open data format is a format that has publicly available specification and anyone can use it, as opposed to formats whose specification is not publicly available, the only way to use them is to reverse engineer them, which is something their author (for example, but not only, microsoft) actively tries to prevent by constantly making undocumented changes, in an attempt to lock the users into some private software ecosystem.

    purpose of open data format is that anyone can share and exchange data, no matter what apps they decide to use, so trying to prevent anyone to use it would be directly counterproductive.

    so for example i use libreoffice, you use ms word, and we can exchange the data files and they look as intended on the other person’s computer, because microsoft is free to read and write .odt files, their documentation is publicly available and no one asks microsoft to start giving out ms word for free or sod off. which was not the case when people had to reverse engineer structure of the .doc file.