🚀 go-pugleaf

The Word Format discussion brings a little story to mind.  It's a true tale,
but without the true names.

Once upon a time, not too long ago, the WhizBang workstation company
cooked up a network filesystem protocol.  It was powerful, it was secure,
but it was proprietary.  Meanwhile, the BlindingLight workstation company
cooked up a different protocol.  It was public-domain.

The folks at WhizBang scoffed at BlindingLight, believing that their own
protocol would dominate the market because it was "better".  As time passed,
however, more and more workstations from more and more companies supported
the BlindingLight protocol.  WhizBang's protocol continued to be available
only on WhizBang workstations.

Eventually, even WhizBang grudgingly supported the BlindingLight protocol
because it had become the de-facto standard.

The moral here is that "proprietary standard" is an oxymoron.  If you plan
to dominate the market with a whiz-bang program, you had better give its
file formats away to whoever asks for it.


[In partial defense of Microsoft, it sounds like they do provide a
publically-documented word processor data transfer format, the
"Rich Text Format".]


Brad Needham