To be fair, you can't read any files without software, you need a text editor even for plaintext.

However, all software is not equal. Any OS comes with a text editor and a ZIP utility by default now. The same is not true for SQLite's format.

But it could easily become true if SQLite was a common document format. Back in the 90's and early 2000's, OS didn't come with a ZIP utility either.

Which OS doesn't come with SQLite?

• Win 10 apparently does (I don't use it, so can't personally verify). Win7/8 don't.

• Every version of OSX for many years does

• Fairly sure the main Linux distro's do

• FreeBSD does, not sure about NetBSD/DragonFlyBSD though.

Checking a local OpenBSD 6.x box just now, sqlite/sqlite3 aren't in the default user path, so maybe that's one that doesn't.

I don't think that's true. Does Ubuntu come with zip by default now?

Normally tar balls are used and zip has to installed afterwards:

apt install zip

I read the article as advocating for more open binary formats. That it is useful to have binary formats is logical. That someone would like to have open ones is I think a nice thought.

"Any OS comes with a text editor and a ZIP utility by default now."

The same thing is becoming true of SQLite (and pretty much is true if you exclude older versions of Windows). We're talking about one of the two (estimated) most-widely-deployed software projects in the world today (http://sqlite.org/mostdeployed.html). It's FOSS, ubiquitous, easily embeddable, works remarkably well, and has bindings for pretty much every programming language under the sun. As far as a general-purpose file format goes, a SQLite database is thus pretty close to ideal.

> The same is not true for SQLite's format.

That's not entirely true. Anything that comes with Python installed has SQLite bundled/compiled in. It's just the library, not the cli, but still.

Arguably, any OS should come with SQLite too. It's pretty close to being as standard as text (which can be complicated too sometimes).

Actually, iirc the OpenDocument format also includes an uncompressed, human readable, pure XML format.

> Actually, iirc the OpenDocument format also includes an uncompressed, human readable, pure XML format.

For some values of "readable" and "human".

It's the 'flat' versions (fods etc.). Diff can be used on them.

Writing a zip unpacker — including deflate decompressor — can be wrapped up in half a day by an average developer.

It sounds like good nuclear war proof solution. Maybe it is better to encode documents in Morse, because average radio man could transmit it via key in half a week.

> It sounds like good nuclear war proof solution.

It fits the requirements of reading the file without (external) software since you can trivially reimplement it, and is also a much lower threshold than "you need to reimplement sqlite", which is why pretty much every system out there comes bundled with a zipfile unpacker.