416 - Open document formats

I’ve talked about open document formats before. I don’t think I articulated my argument quite as well as Steven Garrity does in this article. It’s an interesting article, as are its predecessors on open formats for music and instant messaging.

I particularly liked this sentence, which I think sums up much of the argument in a couple of sentences:

If your mom buys a computer, writes you a letter, and emails it to you in the Microsoft Word format, you have to pay Microsoft to read the letter.

That describes my problem in a nutshell: why should I be forced to spend (a large amount of) money just to read a document sent to me?