One of the more absurd things is that people continue to store their own information in formats that make ownership and control of this data somewhat of a 'joint venture'. Without Microsoft's 'permission', people can be denied access to their own knowledge, which they once typed down.

The NLnet Foundation wants to change that and a request has been made for Microsoft to ease and facilitate the escape route from its deprecated binary formats to an open standard like ODF.

Dutch not-for-profit venture capitalist NLnet Foundation has called on Microsoft to release its older file formats into the public domain to enable businesses, open source-developers and the standards community to better access their own documents in the future, and to help them get Microsoft's products to work with the new open standard ODF.

It remains quite hard to one's comprehension. We ended up in a state where people store their data on their computers, but they have no real control over this data. To make matters worse, they can be virtually forced to purchase new software for whatever price a single vendor charges merely to be allowed to continue to interact with this data. How did we end up this way? Why was this permitted? And why is Microsoft trying to intercept attempts to change and to end this abuse? ⬆

"It’s a Simple Matter of [Microsoft’s] Commercial Interests!"

--Microsoft's Doug Mahugh about OOXML