[icebraining]

Proud custodians? Yes, they wrote the format and controlled it, but it was no different that a proprietary protocol; it was just a necessary way of allowing people to send data around. .DOC and .PSD in particular have always been proprietary messes that they wanted you to treat as a black box.

[Touche]

I was thinking more about OpenDocument, EPub, PNG. Things we take for granted today. It seems that once efforts transferred to the web companies simply have no desire to cooperate on their protocols. Even though cloud syncing is simple enough that dozens of companies have reinvented it, the companies don't feel any obligation (as I personally feel they have) to open up these protocols.

[icebraining]

I don't think those examples were ever representative, and recent examples still exist: Google alone has WebP, WebM and KML, at least. And PNG didn't came from a company, it came from an ad-hoc group, and we definitively still have ad-hoc groups coming up with new standard formats.

Even though cloud syncing is simple enough that dozens of companies have reinvented it, the companies don't feel any obligation (as I personally feel they have) to open up these protocols.

I agree, but I don't agree that they used to. Most formats were and have always been proprietary. Open formats are and were an exception, and they were poorly supported by the industry at large. Yeah, we had Open Document, but the biggest Office suit didn't support them.

Similarly, ownCloud has an open protocol for syncing, but most vendors don't support it, just like they didn't used to support open formats unless they were forced to by their popularity. It's nothing new.

[Touche]

You may be right, I may be looking at the past with rose-colored glasses. But still, it feels worse these days. Those formats I mentioned might have been developed by groups, but they were groups made up of companies with expertise, right?

With cloud syncing we have a few open alternatives, you mentioned ownCloud, but there's also git annex, and clearskies (btsync clone).

But those are all community projects. No corporate support. At least in the OpenDocument days you had Sun as the corporate owners.

Why does DropBox not feel some responsibility to step in here, as the industry leader? This is a company that was launched on HackerNews. You are like us, why does this not bother you?

[icebraining]

You may be right, I may be looking at the past with rose-colored glasses. But still, it feels worse these days. Those formats I mentioned might have been developed by groups, but they were groups made up of companies with expertise, right?

Yeah, but that still happens. There's the W3C and the WHATWG, of course, but also formats like Opus (Xiph.Org, Skype, Mozilla and others) and protocols like OData.

At least in the OpenDocument days you had Sun as the corporate owners. (...) Why does DropBox not feel some responsibility to step in here, as the industry leader? This is a company that was launched on HackerNews. You are like us, why does this not bother you?

I think you're being a little unfair to Dropbox here. You should remember that Sun was in a very different situation: they weren't market leaders, they were users and the main vendor (MS) was asking them so much to license Office, that it was cheaper to flat-out buy StarOffice. And then opening it up was certainly socially beneficial, but it was also a way of pulling some power from Microsoft's hands and making it easier for Sun to avoid licensing their suite.

Dropbox, on the other hand, has no clear business case for opening up. They'd be adding a lot of risk to their main and only product, and for what? Good will?

I'm not saying they shouldn't open up, but I don't think we should judge them too harshly.

By the way, I'm very doubtful of the idea that HN has a whole has an ethical position on opening up. I'd say the mainstream position here is "we like open source if and when it benefits us". Which is why you see plenty of open source libraries and programming tools, but very few open consumer software. Proprietary SaaS is the mantra around here, not FOSS applications.