Issue 1 The problems are _not_ intrinsic to all electronic formats, only to proprietary ones Most of all, there needs to be an openness in the members of the free software community, to speak to people from other disciplines about these key issues which are of benefit to us all. That hasn’t always been one of the strengths of the community, but it’s probably what’s required. Once such power-users of file formats are converted to using free formats, they will have a very nonlinear effect on promoting change. After all, the biggest reason people adopt formats is: that the format is what they need to access their favorite information. It’s only after a format has come into wide use that it begins to encourage other authors to switch to it. So promoting the idea to technically-capable early adopters just makes sense. But we have to be aware that these users need more than just a new word processing format—technical users have a wide range of data format needs. Finally, we have to have patience. It won’t happen overnight, and most disciplines move more slowly than the computer industry does. But it seems very likely that it will happen. And it must—after all, the inability to share information, driven by superstition and guild secrecy (the first incarnation of so-called intellectual property), is what put the “dark” in “Dark Ages”. None of us want to go there, and that’s the point we’ve got to sell as a community.
Bibliography MARC 21 Standard FRBR Standard Dublin Core Initiative DMCA information Public Knowledge Anansi Spaceworks Narya Project Project Gutenberg OASIS Standards Body PNG Standard Ogg Vorbis Ogg Theora Scalable Vector Graphics IGES CAD format STEP CAD format Open Cascade library PythonCAD project Blender program Texas OSI free format definition
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