At the SME Data Exchange conference, at least two of the CAD vendors were promoting their own "open" data format while simultaneously forgetting to support the STEP format. It seemed to me that the audience was well aware of the double speak involved in these presentations.
Over at Wired News, Momus published an article called the Dead Formats Society. Momus was not specifically talking about CAD data formats, but his analogy applies just the same. He described how the Shinto Ise Shrine is torn down every twenty years and reconstructed. The only former items that remain in every shrine are a mirror, a string of jewels, and a sword. His point is that formats come and go so quickly that we are bound to be losing something important along the way.
In the CAD industry, one of the reasons the vendors do not want to surrender the keys to their data formats is to lock in their customers and continue collecting licensing fees, even after the CAD package is dead.
Momus's title is, of course, a play on the Robin Williams' film Dead Poets Society. One of the best scenes in that movie has Robin Williams, as a all-boys prep school teacher, showing his class the pictures of the students in the school trophy case. The students in the pictures were all long since dead, but he pointed out that except for the hair styles and dress they all looked pretty much like the students in his class. The he said he could hear them whispering "Sieze the day, sieze the day." We can cease the day too, and encourage our companies to stop using proprietary data formats.










