Tim Bray on owning your work product:
Let me put it this way: if you occasionally create documents or spreadsheets
or presentations, and if you think that you’d like to own them, independent of your Office software vendor, well, you have exactly one choice: OpenDocument.If those docs/spreadsheets/presos might be long-lived, or contain high-value
data that you might want to re-use later, and you don’t use OpenDocument, well
there’s a word for that but I’m not going to put it up on the front page at
ongoing.
Kieran Healey from a day or so earlier on managing it with a ponderous toolchain: seems like a lot of work, but it still ties back to owning the stuff you make.
Never put information into something if you don’t know how you’re going to get it back out, unmunged. I usually apply that to database schemas — you should know what queries you plan to run against a database before you start — but in these days of format and version creep, perhaps it extends more broadly.
[composed and posted with ecto]