Proprietary format

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A proprietary format is a file format which is covered by a patent or copyright. Typically such restrictions attempt to prevent Reverse engineering, though reverse engineering of file formats for the purposes of interoperability is generally believed to be legal by those who practise it. Legal positions differ according to each country's laws related to, among other things, software patents.

The opposite of a proprietary format is an open format which does not place restrictions on end users and are often also human readable.

[edit] Privacy, ownership, risk and freedom

One of the contentious issues surrounding the use of proprietary formats is that of ownership. If the information is stored in a way which the user's software provider tries to keep secret, the user may own the information, but have no way to retrieve it except by using their software. If the user can't retrieve it but the software manufacturer can — they have practical control of the user's information. The fact that the user depends on a piece of software to retrieve the information stored in his/her proprietary format files gives almost guaranteed sales for future releases of that software, and is the basis for the vendor lock-in concept.

The issue of risk comes about because exactly how a proprietary format works is not publicly recorded. 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, though this is less likely if the format is reverse-engineered and the result is made publicly available. Such situations are quite common, especially for outdated versions of software.

[edit] Prominent proprietary formats

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Further information might be found on the talk page or at requests for expansion. (November 2007)

DOC — Microsoft Word Document
DWG — AutoCad Drawing
MP3 — MPEG Audio Layer 3
PSD — Adobe Photoshop's native image format

[edit] Prominent open formats

Plain text, in ASCII and other character encodings, such as the ISO 8859 variants and UTF-8, both extensions of ASCII (strictly speaking these are all different formats, but are often referred to en bloc as "plain text")
HTML — standard mark-up language used on the web
Portable Network Graphics — raster graphics image format common on the web
Office Open XML — Office Open XML, file format used by Microsoft Office 2007 and OpenOffice.org 3.0.
OpenDocument — OASIS XML specifications for text (odt), spreadsheet (ods), drawing (odg) and presentations (odp), as used in OpenOffice.org.
SVG — vector graphics using XML
XCF — GIMP's native image format
Ogg — Container format for Vorbis (audio), Theora (video), Speex (speech), FLAC (audio), all of which are also open data formats