OpenRAW

I want my images to be available to me in several decades' time, and to future generations.

In my work as a professional astronomer, all the digital images I have taken are stored in a RAW-like form, FITS (Flexible Image Transport System).
FITS was invented over 20 years ago, and is now an ANSI standard, precisely because at that time astronomers were having trouble sharing CCD camera images with each other, or even moving their images from one observatory to another as they changed jobs. The images need to be in a raw form, so that measurements can be made from them, in a variety of ways.

FITS was a huge advance, because now anybody could write the image from any manufacturer's CCD camera with any kind of computer system, and anybody else
could read that format, on any kind of computer system. In the internet age, lots of astronomical images are made available through web-enabled data archives. This is only possible through having a common, well-described and completely open format, like FITS.

Photographs of the everyday world are using very similar kinds of technology to
CCD cameras. There is no technical reason at all that a common RAW-like interchange format could be used by camera manufacturers. They could even use FITS if they want; it may need a few extensions, but there's a mechanism for that.

In my work I have used photographic images over a hundred years old. These images are carefully kept and should easily last another hundred years, but eventually the slow chemical reactions going on inside them will degrade them.
How many digital camera manufacturers can guarantee access to images taken
with their cameras, in 100 years time?

Digital images are basically permanent, if you take care to transfer them to
new media from time to time. And, of course, if you have
software to read them with. Because computer systems change
so fast, the only way to ensure this is to have a completely open description
of the data format, so that new readers can be written from the ground up in computer languages of the day.

Photograpic imaging is dying out. If we do not have a RAW format soon, the pictorial record of decades of family history, and our wider social history,
will be lost because of the greed and lack of foresight of a few camera manufacturers. They are shooting themselves in the foot, however. An open RAW format would produce an enormous flowering of digital imagery. Look at what happened with HTML (the web, duh), and MP3 (podcasts).