Most people these days use a type of computer, be it a smartphone, tablet, laptop, or desktop computer. What most people don’t understand is that the 99% of the data they create on these devices is not theirs thanks to Big Tech and vendor lock-in.
What do I mean by Vender Lock-In?
When people say vendor lock-in, they often think of application lock-in. However, I have a different perspective. To me, vendor lock-in refers to proprietary file formats.
For example, the reason you can’t easily switch away from Microsoft Office isn’t the application itself but the files it creates and the files you already have that are already in its proprietary file formats. These files can only be accurately read with the Microsoft Office applications.
So, the .xlsx, .pptx or .docx files on your storage device are the culprit, not the application itself.
The question has to be, what can you do about it?
Open file formats.
Lets go back to Microsoft Office as an example. There is an open document format called ODF, or open document format that has been around since 2005. It is also known as ISO 26300.
The standard is developed and maintained by a technical committee in the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) consortium.
It was based on the Sun Microsystems specification for OpenOffice.org XML, the default format for OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice. It was originally developed for StarOffice “to provide an open standard for office documents.”
This standard is gaining traction at the EU level and recently the federal German government has recently mandated that all its departments use ODF and PDF file formats by default, scrapping the Microsoft formats. However, they haven’t mandated that government employees can’t use the Microsoft Office suite of applications.
What makes ODF special?
ODF is not controlled by any one big corporation, or what people call Big Tech. It is free to use and is well supported. The latest version of this standard is V1.4.
All major office suites, including Microsoft Office, OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice just to name some examples, support it.
Other open standards.
Markdown is another major open standard, and is the primarily file format I use.
Markdown is a lightweight markup language for creating formatted text using a plain-text editor. John Gruber created Markdown in 2004 as an easy-to-read markup language. Markdown is widely used for blogging, instant messaging, and large language models, and also used elsewhere in online forums, collaborative software, documentation pages, and readme files.
Again this format is not controlled by any one person or company.
Many programs use Markdown, from open-source options like Obsidian and ThiefMD to commercial ones such as Typora, iA Writer and Drafts.
Since markdown is simply plain text, any computer can read it, including simple programs like Notepad on Windows, TextEdit on macOS and GEdit on Linux.
Another advantage of using Markdown is the small file size, as Markdown files are essentially just simple plain text files.
What file formats do I primarily use?
Like I said above the main file format I use is Markdown. I use it with Obsidian when writing blog posts, my diary and other general documents. My note taking platform of choice, Nextcloud Notes, also uses Markdown.
I also use the ODF format when Markdown isn’t sufficient, such as for financing or complex word processing documents. For this I use two applications: LibreOffice on Windows and Linux and Collabora Office on Mac and iPad OS. Both are open source and free. While Collabora Office is also available for iOS I don’t need it there. The reason why I use Collabora Office on the Mac instead of LibreOffice is I don’t like the user interface of LibreOffice on the Mac, it just looks wired to me.
ODF is also the default format for Nextcloud Office, the self hosted GSuite replacement I use. Nextcloud Office uses a customised version of Collabora Office which itself is a customised version of LibreOffice. Nextcloud office only needs a web browser to use, like Google Docs.
I use multiple operating systems, macOS, Linux, Windows, iOS and iPad OS. Markdown and ODF are fully compatible on all those systems, as well as Android, BeOS and ChromeOS if you use devices that run those operating systems.
Conclusion
While some people argue about vendor lock-in and advocate for only using open-source software, I believe one of the main pillars of digital autonomy is to use open file formats. This approach allows you to create your data using any program you prefer to use and you have the ability to easily switch if you’re unhappy with that application.
However, changing file formats is significantly more difficult than just changing applications.
This is just 2 examples of open file formats, there are others like .ogg for music and .csv for simple databases. More information can be found on wikipedia.
This is only one step, but an important step, towards digital autonomy.
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