updated October 23 2025
Our future ability to communicate freely depends on keeping our words in public and open standard formats that are not controlled by corporations that decide who can afford the reading licenses.
I don’t particularly care what software you use to edit and prepare your documents. When you distribute them, please distribute them in a public, open format that everyone can read freely without paying a license fee.
I have received from you a file encrypted in a Microsoft proprietary (trade secret) file format, e.g. Excel, Word, PowerPoint, etc. I would like to read what you say, but your chosen format makes this expensive, difficult, and possibly illegal unless I buy a license from Microsoft USA.
Microsoft proprietary document formats are not like open and published public document formats such as Plain Text, web pages (HTML), Adobe PDF (Portable Document Format), Open Document XML, or even Microsoft RTF (Rich Text Format). They are proprietary unpublished trade secrets owned and exclusively controlled by Microsoft USA. The format is not public; nothing other than software licensed by Microsoft USA knows exactly how it works.
Software licensed from Microsoft USA is the only software that can properly decode the secret proprietary document formats; though, other companies try with varying degrees of incompatible success.
In contrast, anyone can use and decode any of the published, public standards for free. (See “Public Standard Document Formats” below.)
When you send a file encoded in this secret and proprietary way, you require me (and all your readers) to have purchased the appropriate license from Microsoft USA to read it correctly. Only Microsoft-licensed software can do this accurately, and the licenses will cost us several hundred dollars each. Your document is too expensive to read!
I have chosen not to buy Microsoft USA licenses to read your document.
People sometimes ask what is wrong with circulating documents in the expensive Microsoft proprietary formats, since some free software can now read some of it.
There are some non-Microsoft programs that do try to decode the secret Microsoft proprietary document format by guessing at what the format is. My free Linux system has programs like this, so I can often read parts of some Microsoft documents; though, the fonts are often wrong and the spacing and pagination are worse.
Trying to reverse-engineer these Microsoft formats is a waste of resources, and the result is often unusable.
Non-Microsoft decoding of proprietary documents isn’t guaranteed to work (since only Microsoft knows what the real format is), and recent laws in the USA such as the DMCA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act) have made illegal the decoding of, or the attempt to decode, or the posession of programs that might be used to decode, some kinds of proprietary document formats.
Unlicensed programs that attempt to decode these patented Microsoft document formats may already be illegal.
Some of the electronic world, led by Microsoft, is moving to employ patented and proprietary “digital rights management” (DRM) software that will limit our ability to communicate freely with one another. Microsoft already owns the document format you are using; versions of this proprietary format are encrypted or patented in such a way that I cannot read it legally without buying a Microsoft license.
Money sent to purchase Microsoft licenses goes into upcoming features such as “trusted computing” that will eventually deny you the ability to read or publish unless you pay Microsoft to do so, and unless your readers pay every time for the rights to read your documents.
This is the precursor to a very non-free world where we can only read documents if we pay royalty fees every time we open the document.
See the future fiction short story The Right to Read by Richard Stallman.
You have sent me an entire (huge) word processor document, as if you expected me to want to edit your document to change the font or line spacing or paragraph style. I don’t. I just want to read what you said. I don’t need a huge word processor document just to read your words.
Typically the text inside your huge Word file is only 10% of the document. If you cut-and-paste just the text, it is one-tenth of the size.
Please send me a smaller document format that just expresses what you said. I don’t need to edit it; I just want to read it.
In both the USA and Europe, Microsoft has been convicted of illegal, anti-competitive, and monopolistic business practices designed to suppress competition and limit the choices we have to communicate with one another.
The world is not a better place if we distribute documents in this proprietary format that supports serious corporate misbehaviour.
Many open and public document formats are not the proprietary trade secrets of corporations. You can publish documents in these formats and nobody has to buy a license to read them. These public formats include:
Anyone can read or write documents in these open formats freely. None of the open formats require you to buy a license or expensive software to read or write them.
Our future ability to communicate freely depends on keeping our words in public and open standard formats that are not controlled by corporations that decide who can afford the reading licenses.
I don’t particularly care what software you use to edit and prepare your documents. When you distribute them, please distribute them in a public, open format that everyone can read freely without paying a license fee.
See the future fiction short story The Right to Read by Richard Stallman.
Microsoft makes moves to disallow others from reading its file formats:
I don’t particularly care what software you use to edit and prepare your documents, but perhaps you might. Here’s free/libre word processing software that plays fair (even on Windows):
The free/libre OpenDocument format is:
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