I mean this by way of comparison to applications that were distributed on floppy such as WordPerfect, dBase, FoxPro and so on, where the data format was proprie

I mean this by way of comparison to applications that were distributed on floppy such as WordPerfect, dBase, FoxPro and so on, where the data format was proprietary. It's only relatively recently that we've seen open-source and open-data applications. These are arguably better but relatively rare.