I was excited to see this website, and...
I was excited to see this website, and the start of this campaign. I believe the only solution for the future of digital photography is for all software and hardware manufactures to publish their file formats.
The digital world moves too fast for hidden and protected file formats. In a short time, digital photography has grown from being a novelty to being the future of photography as an artform and as a business. While digital photography was in its infancy, having closed protected file formats didn't matter so much. But now that more and more photographers rely on digital cameras for their livelihood, this issue has become more serious.
We photographers are at the mercy of the good graces of software and hardware companies, like never before. A simple decision to no longer support an old camera file could prove devistating to a photographer's livelihood and an artist's legacy.
Most photographers are small business owners. Their dedication, vision, and hard work is the real reason digital photography has taken off and succeeded. Yet the constant race to make sure their growing collection of digital work is "future compatible" can consume more and more of their time and resources, making it harder to stay in business.
Also, imagine if Ansel Adams had worked in digital. With the way things are today, all of his original negatives would probably be now lost to history, encrypted and stored in long-forgotten file formats. And imagine the next Ansel Adams, doing groundbreaking work on an early Canon or Nikon digital camera, who's future legacy already being threatened by that company's casual decision to no longer support that old file format.
I ask that Nikon, Canon, Kodak and the other camera manufacturers openly and freely publish their raw file formats. I also ask them to more fully support open file formats. I also ask software companies such as Adobe to publish their proprietary file formats. Innovate all you want, but don't hide the data from your users. Stop trying to make money on the razor blades, and focus your energy on the razor.
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http://www.modernketubah.com
Daniel, I note your statement "I also ask software companies...
Daniel, I note your statement "I also ask software companies such as Adobe to publish their proprietary file formats".
I agree, but I recently learned that I could actually save my Photoshop images as TIFF rather than PSD files, and still preserve the layers. I would have a variety of degrees of loss-less compression, and TIFF 6.0 is already published, (free download from the Adobe site). I believe there are professionals who never use the Photoshop proprietary PSD format.
That could be what you want?
(Try telling printer manufacturers "stop trying to make money on the ink, and focus your energy on the printer! They will laugh all the way to the bank).