[Ourgon]

Proprietary vs. open is like renting vs. owning without the legal protection offered to renters. If your data is locked in some proprietary format you're beholden to the proprietor who can - and often does - abuse his power by raising prices, adding intrusive 'features', selling access to your eyes and more. No EULA is going to change that since those agreements can be changed more or less at will.

In other words keep your EULA, I don't want it.

[kube-system]

There is nothing about proprietary licensed software that requires it to use proprietary data formats. There also exists FOSS software using esoteric formats. You can, and probably should, know how software is going to store your data before you use it, no matter what license it has.

[marcodiego]

Check how often guitar-pro changed their format for no perceived benefit. Corel didn't even support svg, last time I checked (years ago, admittedly).

The point is: a locked proprietary format is in the interest of proprietary software vendors. It benefits the vendor but hurts the user.

The vendor can even make something document well enough to be used by governments but closed enough to be impractical to be freely implementable. See ms office formats.

[Brian_K_White]

"There is nothing about proprietary licensed software that requires it to use proprietary data formats."

All that matters is the fact that if you can't see the code then you can't implement the format unless the developer degns to give you specs, and doesn't lie about the specs. And the fact that, in practice, what actually happens is, proprietary software takes every opportunity it can possibly get away with to vendor-lock data.

It doesn't matter that they don't have to, what matters is that they do, and, you have no option to take matters into your own hands when the vendor doesn't please you.

"There also exists FOSS software using esoteric formats."

This is a stupid statement. By which I mean it invalidates it's own self.

When the source to generate some data is a available, it doesn't matter what the format is. No matter how complex and disorganized or "esoteric" the data, and no matter how terrible the source code that generated it, and even no matter how old or obscure the language or platform used, it still exists as a reference. That simple existence is the difference between possible and not-possible, and that is all the difference in the world. That difference is 1000x more important than any level of convenient vs inconvenient.

"esoteric" is a meaningless word in the presense of x-ray goggles.

The data remains usable and interoperable no matter what it is. It doesn't matter if it's common or onscure, or current or ancient, or human-readable or encrypted binary, and no one has the power to deny you access to read the data or to generate compatible data from outside of the original app, and regardless of the original developer's intentions.

There is no slightest shred of a valid argument here.

[monocasa]

> There also exists FOSS software using esoteric formats.

They're esoteric, but not proprietary. The article is making the argument that with proprietary agreements you can pay someone for support. With FOSS, that's also true with the added benefit that the market for support isn't impeded by the artificial barrier of IP access.

[Ourgon]

That is the theory, now look at the practice of proprietary software/services and see if the theory holds. It clearly does not, one of the bigger problems with proprietary IT is the lock-in caused by undocumented data formats, services which do not allow bulk data extraction and similar obstacles.