Dario

I'm one of the founders of this project. When I realized that most people don't have a clue about what it means to use specific kinds of file format when sharing documents or archiving their own work, I had a chat with Bastien Guerry about the idea of starting a collaborative project to provide a plain documentation for a non-geek readership about the main issues behind open vs. closed document- and data formats. That's how the openformats.org was born. This project is intentionally not limited to public standards: there are excellent advocacy websites on the importance of public standards to promote fair competition and to enhance interoperability of different products. openformats.org takes a less radical position and includes in the category of open formats also those proprietary formats whose specifications are (1) publicly available and (2) freely implementable. The reason is that, we believe, it's way more urgent to make users, organizations and companies aware of the importance of openness of data formats as a necessary condition for data perennity and interoperability, than to blame them for their habits or urge them to embrace unconditionally the cause of public standards, before they even know what the standards issue really is about.

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