Although downvotes don't necessarily mean factual incorrectness (and I didn't downvote), that may have been the case here. It may also have been because the com

Although downvotes don't necessarily mean factual incorrectness (and I didn't downvote), that may have been the case here. It may also have been because the comment could be read as implying undue influence (and thereby indirect subsidy) by government regulation, injecting controversy/politics where there is none. Regardless, I wasn't able to find in the WP entry adequate support of your assertion. (Oddly, the "[..]" were in the original WP text): > As IBM is the only remaining provider of hardware (and only in their mainframes) using their non-standard floating-point format, no popular file format requires it; Except the FDA requires the SAS file format and "All floating-point numbers in the file are stored using the IBM mainframe representation. [..] Most platforms use the IEEE representation for floating-point numbers. [..] To assist you in reading and/or writing transport files, we are providing routines to convert from IEEE representation (either big endian or little endian) to transport representation and back again." Code for IBM's format is also available under LGPLv2.1 There's only a regulation for a file format (and a single, isolated one at that), not regulation of using/processing, and format conversion utilities are available, rendering it irrelevant.