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Message: <blockquote data-quote="rknop" data-source="post: 7724824" data-attributes="member: 20176">How much software on disks that you purchased 20 years ago can you still use?Chances are the software came on 3.5" floppies.  (Well, 25 years ago.)   Many computers don't even have that format any more.  Lots of people have word processing documents from ages past that they can't open because the proprietary software used to write it no longer exists.  (Paperback Writer on the C128, anybody?)As the Gutenberg project has been arguing for years, the most future proof format for text documents is plain ASCII.  However, PDF does pretty well.  Crucially, it's an openly documented format.  Anybody can implement it, and all the information needed to do so is publicly available.  This is not true for a proprietary format, nor is it true if you need a specific app to run it.Um.  The iphone was first a thing in 2007 or thereabouts.  I was writing PDFs in the late 1990s.  PDF as a format is at least twice as old as apps are.I've used quite a number of android apps that I can  no longer use because they don't work with newer versions of android, and because the author of the app no longer cares to update it.Another point of history: when DriveThruRPG first opened, there was a kerfluffle because they were using DRM on their PDFs.  A lot of people (myself included) complained about this.  Among other things was the complaint that these PDFs were not future proof.  They depended on an Adobe server that would be there to authorize the DRM for you. Many people argued back that we were being paranoid and open-source zealots.  Adobe, after all, is a very big and stable company, and it's ridiculous to fear that it will go away any time soon.You can guess what happened.  Within a surprisingly short period of time (if memory serves, it was only a year or two), Adobe announced that it was discontinuing the DRM that DTRPG was using.  DTRPG was forced to issue new PDFs to the people who'd bought them.  The people who'd bought them were lucky that DTRPG was still around to do so; had the company gone out of business (which wouldn't have been a problem, DRM proponents argued, because Adobe was plenty stable), people would have been SOL.DTRPG now makes the very wise choice to sell watermarked PDFs rather than DRM-encumbered PDFs.It's always a mistake to buy content with proprietary locks on it, unless you're happy with the risk of not being able to access that content five or ten years in the future.  DVDs are mostly OK, because the locks have been fully cracked.  Of course, it's not legal to download the software necessary to watch a DVD you have legally purchased on hardware you own... but that's the US copyright regime for you.  If you really want to *own* the RPG books you buy, if you want to be able to crack them open in 40 years (like I did the other day with my 1e PHB),  you need them in an open format that is supported by lots of different readers.  They can't be a format that's only viewable by a set of proprietary readers, or that's locked behind DRM.  Track record shows that PDF is probably the best format to bet on.</blockquote>

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