It should be obvious to any reasonably intelligent human being that locking information in the proprietary format is dumb thing to do. This is in particular true for any government. Can you imagine not being able to recover birth certificates of your own citizens because the owner of the proprietary format just went out of business or it has headquarters in a hostile state.
What is not obvious from the above post is that currently it is almost impossible to lock yourself. Namely M$ switched 2007 to fully open standard formats (docx for example). If you do not trust me just unzip docx file and look for work directory. Then find the file document.xml and strip it from XML code! For all practical purposes 2007 document formats have copied docbook formats the way that RTF have shamelessly stolen from TeX. So M$ document formats is just an XML file and bunch of XML style sheet files describing the graphical form of the page. The only difference between the docbook and M$ documents is that M$ hides from users the process of creating XML files (use mouse and click left click right crap instead of typing real XML much like RTF vs. TeX).
Cheers,
OKO
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