Open source takes no hostages

Sam Varghese
Friday, 12 June 2009 06:36

Opinion and Analysis

Have you ever had the experience of creating and storing data in a certain application, only to find that your dependency on a proprietary format means that you have lost all your data?
If you're lucky, you may be able to recreate everything from scratch. But how many people keep hard copies of their personal and business data these days?

At one stage of my life, I set out to write what I thought would be the definitive book on Middle East politics. Three chapters into the book, I had to pull up stumps for a while as I was relocating to Australia.

That was the end of the project. I had used Multimate, a word processor that was manufactured by a company called Ashton Tate. The company went out of business and its document format died with it.
Forty-three pages of text went waste and I ditched the idea of the book altogether.

Why is this relevant today? The world's biggest software manufacturer, Microsoft, has just announced that after June 30, its personal finance and small business package Money will no longer be available for sale.

People who have bought Microsoft Money would have to activate it before January 31, 2011. The company says it will provide online services for Money for two years after activation or until 31 January 2011. End of story.

With a package like Money, new versions take into account the changing laws that govern small business and personal finances and the headache of managing money disappears.

But what about your data? Is Microsoft going to offer a package that can translate that data into something that could, perhaps, be used by a package like that put out by Intuit?

Unlikely, given that Microsoft once tried to buy Intuit and was only stopped by the US department of justice which "felt strongly that the proposed merger would lead to higher prices and less innovation in the personal finance software market."

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