Open document standards will cure Apple’s bit rot

Reports emerged this week of a problem for Apple users opening presentation files created in Keynote. The latest update of Keynote — in fact, all of iWork ’13 — won’t open files created with versions before iWork ’09, instead prompting users to find a copy of iWork ’09 and open the file with that.

If a user has simply upgraded to iWork ’13 from ’09, the old version is still archived on the computer and can be used to open the file (look in /Applications/iWork '09/). But people who haven’t upgraded and thus don’t have the older iWork ’09 version also installed — say, because they are at work accessing files created at home — would indeed be unable to open older files. Worse, once you’ve opened old files in iWork ’13, they will no longer work in the old versions.

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Even if there’s currently a workaround for some users (iWork ’13 has an export option to create iWork ’09 files), there probably won’t be one forever, because that’s clearly not Apple’s priority. This is a serious red flag for users of iWork. It demonstrates three important truths.

First, the file format used by the software is considered transient by Apple. The company can and will change it any time, in any way, without warning and without regard to the consequences. Second, work created with this software should be considered unsuitable for archiving. When you need to refer back to a presentation or document in five years, there is a strong possibility you won’t be able to open it reliably. Third, Apple’s priorities are not the same as yours. According to the Verge, Apple made these changes to iWork for easier compatibility with the newest versions of its mobile platform iOS at the known expense of backward compatibility on the Mac.

The problem of bit rot is as old as the software application. It is part of a family of problems caused when the software that manages your data is not under your ultimate control. Another manifestation is “interoperability” — trying to use data created in one application in an equivalent alternative created by a different vendor. Yet another is decayed digital restrictions, where the DRM used by a vendor for an defunct business model continues to defeat legal access by the owner of the data.

This last problem is especially toxic as the DMCA actually makes it a crime to access your own data if to do so you have to break into the defunct DRM. All three are used as a tool to lock-in customers and lock-out competitors, at the cost of customer flexibility.

I’ve encountered these problems repeatedly in my career. I’ve used CTOS Word Processor, IBM DisplayWrite, WordPerfect, Ami Pro, PagePlus, and Microsoft Office — and in each case run into problems opening files in later versions.

Back in the 1980s I had to write a software system to cure an interoperability issue with IBM DisplayWrite and other word processors. In the ’90s I faced problems getting Ami Pro files into Microsoft Word and getting PagePlus files into pretty much anything else. In the last decade I found Microsoft Word documents from new versions on Windows not opening in the version I was running on the Mac. The news that Apple too is messing with file formats and eliminating the ability to access archived files is not too surprising.

This is the exact reason behind the creation of the internationally standardized Open Document Format over a decade ago. Faced with regular forced “upgrades” to versions of software offering little more than the ability to view the files people were sending us, the open source team at Sun Microsystems decided in 2001 to create a truly open, XML-based document format for editable productivity documents. We donated an initial specification to the OASIS standards body, and many others gathered around to create a truly open, software-and-platform-independent set of document formats. Today those formats are supported by all serious productivity software; only those pursuing a lock-in strategy eschew them (in fact, it’s a key indicator).

For successful corporations, there is a corporate aging cycle that progresses relentlessly. There is a sense in which IBM is now becoming GE, Microsoft will become IBM, Apple is becoming Microsoft, Google will become Apple, and so on. It’s a natural consequence of successfully negotiating the challenges explained by Clayton Christensen in “The Innovator’s Dilemma.” We can expect to see this same scenario played out time and time again as each growing business uses proprietary lock-in as a profitable weapon against customers.

This is a perennial problem — with perennial solutions. One of the best is to use open source software like LibreOffice, the community-developed successor to the project from which ODF was originally created. LibreOffice is a Swiss Army knife of file import filters that will rescue a huge number of files in proprietary formats, and from them create open standard ODF and PDF files that you can safely archive and expect to be open long into the future. I’m even told the group is currently working on an import filter for Apple’s proprietary and changeable Keynote file format.

Open standards and open source programs are such good news it’s worth taking the time to tell others. Next week sees Document Freedom Day, an annual celebration of the flexibility to keep using the documents you create beyond the boundaries imposed by vendors. The website is full of resources to help you persuade those around you, and you may even find there’s an event being organized near you. Break the cycle of format lock-in by insisting on open source and open standards.

This article, “Open document standards will cure Apple’s bit rot,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more of the Open Sources blog and follow the latest developments in open source at InfoWorld.com. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.