free software formats are not proprietary by definition

free software formats are not proprietary by definition

Posted Jul 14, 2005 20:19 UTC (Thu) by dvdeug (subscriber, #10998)
In reply to: free software formats are not proprietary by definition by nix
Parent article: Microsoft Surprises with Linux 'Hands-On Lab' (eWeek)

If it has publically available, freely usable specs, then it's not proprietary. PostScript and PDF are clearly not proprietary, and I don't know how you could get that from what I wrote. (I.e. "the fact that only one program reads/writes this format does matter", etc.)

The line is not entirely clear, but you completely avoided my examples. No program besides Lilypond can read in Lilypond files, and no program besides POV-Ray can read in POV-Ray files. Both have very complex syntaxes that would be hard to implement, and both are evolving systems forcing you to chase a rapidly moving target. In both cases, backward compatibility has been broken and probably will be broken again. (ISO standards usually wait at least 5 years between major new versions of a standard, and standards that update faster, like Unicode, are completely backwardly compatible.) So it's hard and probably not fruitful to reimplement them.

I fail to see how a free software format is fundamentally different from a closed source format. You can always reverse engineer a closed source format; many free software licenses have sufficent restrictions you may not want to reuse the code; and much free software code is too hairy or just has the wrong design to just be pulled out and dropped in a new program.

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