Proprietary Format - Privacy, Ownership, Risk and Freedom

Privacy, Ownership, Risk and Freedom

One of the contentious issues surrounding the use of proprietary formats is that of ownership of created content. If the information is stored in a way which the user's software provider tries to keep secret, the user may own the information by virtue of having created it, but they have no way to retrieve it except by using a version of the original software which produced the file. Without a standard file format or reverse engineered converters, users cannot share data with people using competing software. The fact that the user depends on a particular brand of software to retrieve the information stored in a proprietary format files increases barriers of entry for competing software and may contribute to vendor lock-in concept.

The issue of risk comes about because proprietary formats are less likely to be publicly documented and therefore less future proof. If the software firm owning right to that format stops making software which can read it then those who had used the format in the past may lose all information in those files. This is particularly common with formats that were not widely adopted. However, even ubiquitous formats such as Microsoft Word can not be fully reverse-engineered.