The Digital Freedom Foundation (#DFF) is currently gearing up for Document Freedom Day 2025. #DFD2025 celebrates open standards, Free document and multimedia formats and even CC and Public Domain content using open formats. Hope you’ll join in to celebrate on March 26th. More information at About Document Freedom Day - Digital Freedom Foundation
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This is an important issue.
I wonder how we stand with software that is itself Open Source, but stores its files in a specific binary format? For example the R language stores its workspace in a file called .Data which is only readable by R. The format of .Data is not secret, one could crack it manually if need be.
Are we to assume that because software is Open Source it will always be available to read its files?
I would think the above would be less of an issue than proprietary data files, which are both unreadable except by proprietary software, and secret.
As one who has spent countless hours in my remote past writing code to unscramble weird magnetic tape formats, I appreciate modern data portability and the standards that are required to obtain it.
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