Cory Doctorow lately has been on a kick for something he calls adversarial interoperability. He's advocating for things like making it legal to reverse-engineer file formats.

Maybe instead of banning subscription formats, make it unenforceable for a TOS to ban reverse-engineering for compatibility reasons.

>> for something he calls adversarial interoperability

Cory Doctorow has had a lot of interesting ideas, but he didn't coin the term adveserial interoperability. It's a concept and term that predates the Web, and is absolutely the appropriate solution to many of our current predicaments.

All of this has happened before and it will all happen again.

> make it unenforceable for a TOS to ban reverse-engineering for compatibility reasons

While I appreciate that (and since I don't appreciate my work being locked up in proprietary formats, I primarily use either plain-text or LaTeX for documents), there's a whole can of worms around that.

[note that I do not know the specific details of .PSD files, nor the patent status of things below. It's an example]

As an example off the top of my head, Photoshop has a feature called "Content-aware Fill". This lets you delete a region of an image and have it be replaced by auto-generated "reasonable" context (if you delete someone standing on a hill with the sky behind them, it'll interpolate grass and sky for you).

So now I'm reverse-engineering the .PSD format, and discover that a content-aware fill operation is stored in the file as the pixel coordinates and CAF parameters; not the pixels themselves. The CAF algorithm is patented. What now? Under your proposal I'd be justified in carrying on figuring out how to make an interoperable implementation, but... I couldn't distribute that implementation without violating Adobe's patent.

When Indesign was new and everyone was pissed at Quark, Adobe made it possible to import Quark files. It wasn’t perfect, but it was good enough to get you over the transition. Something like this would surely be possible with Indesign files.

The DMCA has a provision allowing that. It is explicitly legal to reverse engineer file formats for the purpose of interoperability.

You're not wrong there, I definitely agree about Adobe's business practices being shady.

My main argument is against them saying that subscription software should be illegal.

subscription software should be illegal _if_ the software does not also contain a feature to port/export your data out in a standard (and supported-by-a-competitor) format.

If they are able to hold your data hostage, then it's not a free-association relationship, and should not be called a subscription, but instead an extortion. Sell me a perpetual license, or sell me a subscription plus ability to move away.

    then it's not a free-association relationship

Why ? You can test the trial for free and discover for yourself that you'll be locked in -- or not.

BTW Photoshop's .psd can be opened in others software. You can export FCP XML from Premiere Pro for Final Cut Pro and DaVinci Resolve (and probably others NLE). You can open Premiere Pro's .prproj, unzip it, extract the XML and edit it yourself; The same goes for After Effects projects, based on RIFF https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_Interchange_File_Form....

Please educate yourself little bit about the products you're criticizing

IDK about InDesign but for their Video software they are one of the most open that exists on the market, and that's why even though they are very buggy they are still worth it. The market for plugins, panels and scripts for Premiere Pro and After Effects is huge

Adobe has always made it a priority to be able to export your entire document in IDML. There's nothing hidden or proprietary in there--just all of the InDesign document content and settings.

In fact, it's standard operating procedures to "cleanse" an .indd file by exporting to IDML and re-importing.

It's up to you to implement something on the receiving end, but there's no lack of openness on Adobe's part.