coffee, black   no sugar


20060419 Wednesday April 19, 2006
from formats to beliefs

I have written a small piece on file formats and how and why the open ones and especially the plain text have done so well. It is a matter of importance to me since I think a lot of non and semi technical people do not pay enough attention to it.

We are living in a time where digital data plays a more and more important role in our lives and society as a whole. If we want to create something of future value, one thing we need to care about is that information we create now needs to be accessible in the future. If I pass information to my child in the form of pictures, weblogs and what not, I want to be sure that it stays accessible. You would not want to your diary written in some proprietary word processor which runs only on a single operation system made for a particular hardware architecture.

More so true for society as a whole. Wikipedia has such enormous momentum also because people believe they create something not only of value now, but also for future generations. If Microsoft Encarta would have started a volunteer contributor project in the 90s, do you think that would have been a success? Of course not, and this has nothing to do with Microsoft. Any commercial company has a responsibility to abandon products which they cannot live on, so an unwillingness to contribute to such a project has nothing to do with trust. Sooner or later the commercial conditions for a product will change and a company has to act accordingly.

Speaking of my age (40), you start to think what you have done (and what you still want to do) a little more than before. I think myself nothing extraordinary in that regard. I believe that my generation knows the value of money and how business needs to operate and wants to live well, no doubt. But I also believe there is a craving to be part of something bigger, something besides the day to day grind.

Maybe this information thing is an illusion and will be hijacked and perverted like so many other things before. But somehow I doubt that. Freely available information has, at least in the long run, always helped humanity to make a step forward, and often a leap. My belief is that society is created and advanced and carried on by individuals. Not some system thrown onto people. So to enable the individual is the best strategy for a society to garantuee its future. And since no one knows which individual(s) will make the necessary contributions and innovations, it has to see that everyone gets a chance.

This is what free is about. Everyone gets a chance.