[License-review] Fwd: [Non-DoD Source] Resolution on NOSA 2.0

[John Cowan]

(Private response)


> Having seen types of Internet service come and go, and likewise
> particular hosting instances come and go, it's been apparent that only
> data in fairly simple commodity formats tend to persist online more
> than a few years:  When technology changes for more-sophisticated
> data formatting, as it always does, the changeover is lossy.
>

I think that's quite true, but the list of "fairly simple commodity formats"
does grow over time, if slowly.  Once it was only ASCII plain text, but now
UTF-8 plain text, any form of SGML including HTML, TeX, and JSON
count as FSCFs, and any of the above with .gz, .zip, and .tar.gz encodings
as well.  On the image side, GIF, JPEG, and probably PNG count too.  PDF
is not simple, but it's so pervasive in so many domains that it is unlikely
to be
obsoleted.

A fortiori, this means that at least the bare content of most ODF and OOXML
documents are accessible, which goes a long way toward being all the
commonly
used document formats in the world.  (I have on occasion done a global
formatting
search and replace, for example to replace an unavailable font, by
unzipping a
Microsoft Word .docx document, editing the XML with a plain text editor,
and rezipping it.)

-- 
John Cowan          http://vrici.lojban.org/~cowan        cowan at ccil.org
In politics, obedience and support are the same thing.  --Hannah Arendt
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