[hntester123]

I agree with this statement of yours:

>Basically, the whole computer industry is one big case of buyer beware.

But not with this:

>If you really care about your data use open formats, open protocols and free software whenever you can.

Your first statement actually kind of contradicts your second - if we think of "buyer" as "user" even if the person has not bought the product - for the reason given below:

There's no guarantee that a particular free software will continue to be supported, just because it is free. Example: iText, the popular and widely-used Java PDF generation library. It was free and open source earlier but some time back got converted to a commercial for-pay product (except that, IIRC, you may be able to use it for free if you make your own product that uses it, free/open source as well).