Re: Proprietary Software term

[David Wright]

On Sat 18 Aug 2018 at 19:55:01 (+0100), Wols Lists wrote:
> On 18/08/18 12:51, David Kastrup wrote:
> >> Indeed, that wasn't expressed too well. What I meant is that
> >> > CodaMusic's policy to use binary non-released (for some time even
> >> > encrypted) file formats strongly discouraged anyone to make a program
> >> > use these files.
> 
> > That's more than just lock-in.  Don't know a good expression, but that's
> > more like locked-away (don't know a good expression for it) since the
> > format is designed to keep the user from being able to access his own
> > information (and/or that of others).  In my book, that's a no-no since
> > it renders archiving worthless.
> > 
> Undocumented proprietary format.
> 
> I compare WordPerfect with Word ... Word's format seems to change with
> almost every release, the changes being in many cases apparently to
> interfere with compatibility with other programs.
> 
> While WordPerfect's format, although proprietary, was well-documented,
> with defined extensibility, and a guarantee of compatibility. To the
> extent that WordPerfect 6, released in 1994, is to the best of my
> knowledge capable of editing and saving - WITHOUT DAMAGING IT - a file
> created by the latest version. So any WordPerfect-compatible program
> should be able to do the same.

"Undocumented proprietary format" doesn't express the intent which
"lock-in" does. As David pointed out, patents can be used to protect
a proprietary format, only I don't think that, for example, the exFAT
filesystem is, in his words, a "strange case".

Of course, MS has history of intent here, as for example, the AARD code.
If you didn't use DRDOS (rather than MSDOS) or haven't heard of the
Halloween documents, that might need googling.

Cheers,
David.