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[Simulchaord-discuss] Project policy on file formats


From: Paul Fernhout
Subject: [Simulchaord-discuss] Project policy on file formats
Date: Wed Apr 10 15:18:02 2002

Just watched Patrick McGoohan's "The Prisoner" series again--
  http://www.faqs.org/faqs/tv/the-prisoner/part1/
ironically on DVD (a proprietary format) but at least checked out from
our "free" (tax-dollar supported) local library.

I'm reminded of this as I think about file formats -- and how having
many or all of your documents in an undocumented proprietary format like
Microsoft Word Doc formats makes one a bit of a prisoner to Microsoft. I
guess the Microsoft rewrite of the Prisoner's Village motto of
"Questions are a burden for others, and Answers are a prison for
oneself" might be "Requests (for documentation of file formats) are a
burden for others, and Accessibility (of your own data) is a prison for
oneself." That's life and doublethink in the Microsoft Village. A
monopoly like Microsoft should in my opinion be forced to disclose its
file formats to allow competition and alternatives. I even wrote the
U.S. Department of Justice on open file formats as that is not part of
the antitrust settlement (as part of a larger grassroots campaign on
such issues). My own comment can be read at:
  http://www.usdoj.gov/atr/cases/ms_tuncom/public/19/mtc-00018061.htm
But the DOJ seems to continue to be ignoring the file format issue and
most of the other issues.

So, in any case, what to do now considering this and other projects, and
considering how deeply embedded the Microsoft Word Doc format
unfortunately is in my own life? After considering various
possibilities, I decided to start using OpenOffice under Windows.
  http://www.openoffice.org/
Four hours of modem downloading and forty megabytes later, I am not a
Microsoft product activation number (as needed for Office XP); I am a
(more) free man! [OK, you can laugh now if you are a Prisoner fan...] 

In any case, OpenOffice seems to work reasonably well -- providing a
potential path to migrate away entirely from proprietary Word Doc files.
And, if and when I can move full time to GNU/Linux, OpenOffice runs
there too. The OpenOffice project is dual licensed (one license is the
LGPL, the other is Sun's Community Source License). OpenOffice can read
and write quite a few formats to various degrees, including some large
subset of Word Doc files (which includes annotation and revision
functions). Some people claim OpenOffice is essentially as compatible as
you can get to a proprietary undocumented binary format like Word Doc
files. I'm not going to pitch anyone big time to change to OpenOffice
(since there are a lot of factors to consider), but at least consider
the possibility -- and it is free to try it out. And if you are still
using Microsoft Office, save and send documents whenever possible in
non-proprietary formats like RTF. Any file in a non-proprietary format
is one more step out of the Microsoft Village of proprietary data
formats and related imprisoning software.

In any case, I would suggest insistently this project only post
documentation in nonproprietary formats like HTML, XML, RTF, or text. I
think it OK to consider OpenOffice native format (an XML derivative) as
acceptable as well for primarily intermediate internal use because that
is now convenient for me and is reasonably accessible to others,
remembering that RTF or HTML are better for general distribution because
they are more widely supported. Please let us avoid the Word Doc format
though.

I am not much of a fan of PDF files for data exchange, for several
reasons including that it's not ideal for onscreen viewing. As Alan Kay
said once, "any written standard with more than five lines is
ambiguous". While there is a book documenting PDF, I think Adobe's 
proprietary implementation still effectively defines the standard in an
obscure way. The PDF format has free implementations for readers and
writers, but I am not sure how well they work (I've encountered various
incompatabilities and limitations in the ones I've tried). But, given
that PDF is ostensibly as well as potentially an open standard, I guess
it is OK too, although not to be encouraged.  (Adobe has also usurped
the meaning on my initials -- which are also PDF...) 

So in general, here is the project file format policy: contributions to
the project should be in as nonproprietary a format as possible.
Ideally, such formats are defined by a free software package which is
cross-platform. 

-Paul Fernhout
Kurtz-Fernhout Software 
=========================================================
Developers of custom software and educational simulations
Creators of the Garden with Insight(TM) garden simulator
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com



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