OpenRAW

If you are a professional working with digital photography and RAW formats, you rerally shouldn't need to be convinced that we need third party RAW converters. Even if the camera manufacturer's converter does the job well for you, you are certainly aware that different photographers with different workflows often require things that the manufacturer's software doesn't do as well as another converter.

The sticky comment from Mario Westphal points out just one huge problem with proprietary RAW formats: there are so many different formats coming on line that must be decoded for third party use, that one of these days it's just not going to be practical for these developers to keep pace with the flow.

And then what happens when a manufacturer decides to sue third party developers to protect their proprietary formats, and the alternatives are no longer available?

Right now, Nikon has begun to hide some information within the RAW file, making it more difficult to decipher the format. What's the next step?

I firmly believe that we need Open RAW formats if for no other reason than to keep the alternatives alive.