Sun Microsystems really do seem to have an important point here. If there aren’t some common underlying standards then reading todays documents fifty years from now could become just like trying to read Linear B today:
Speaking to a group of reporters, Sun’s top open-source executive said that a format like OpenDocument (ODF) is needed to prevent a permanent condition of what he dubbed “corporate Alzheimer’s.”
“I want to make sure that when my grandchild studies history at university, that they can study source documents,” said Chief Open Source Officer Simon Phipps. Phipps said that without a standard that remains stable and is widely adopted, documents won’t be able to be opened decades later.
Well, there is LaTeX. I wouldn’t want to use a Word Processor like Word or OpenOffice for anything that contains more than a fistful of mathematical formulas.
As for distribution, PDF seems reasonable open for me. You can download the standards and write a PDF reader/writer yourself, if you desire to do so.
That said, an easily processable document format could be nice for writing report generator tools.
Isn’t Adobe closing PDF?
Not that I know. The specification is still available for download at http://partners.adobe.com/public/developer/pdf/index_reference.html
and apart from the domineering acrobat there are still a few opensource tools available for reading/writing/generating PDFs, so I am not worried about alzheimer.