A free file format is a file format whose full specification is freely available and for which there are no restrictions (e.g. legal or technical) on its use.^[1] Users may design and use variations that suit their needs, and contribute enhancements for potential incorporation into the next official version of the format.

Free file formats are good for interoperability and to prevent vendor lock-in. It is a cornerstone in open systems.

Archiving and compression

• 7z ? for both archiving and compression.
• SQX ? for both archiving and compression.
• PAQ ? for compression.
• bzip2 ? for compression.
• gzip ? for compression.
• tar ? for archiving.
• ZIP ? for both archiving and compression.

Multimedia

• PNG ? lossless compressed format.^[2]
• MNG ? moving pictures, based on PNG.
• SVG ? vector graphics.^[3]
• Ogg (A container format).
  • Vorbis ? An audio codec.
    • The Vorbis format was developed specifically to compete with the widely used, but patented MP3 audio compression format.
  • Theora ? A video codec.
  • FLAC ? Lossless audio codec.
  • Speex ? Speech codec.
  • CMML ? Timed metadata and subtitles.
• Matroska ? (A container format).
• Musepack ? An audio codec.
• WavPack ? An audio codec.
• SMIL ? A media playlisting format and multimedia integration language.^[4][5]
• XSPF ? A playlist format for multimedia.

Text

• DVI ? device independent (TeX).
• HTML/XHTML ? markup language for web pages.
• LaTeX ? document markup language.
• Office Open XML ? a formatted text format (Ecma-376).^[6]
• OpenDocument v1.0 ? a formatted text format (ISO/IEC 26300:2006).^[7]
• PostScript ? a page description language and programming language.
• RTF ? a formatted text format.
• TXT ? a plain text file.

Other

• CSV ? spreadsheet file formats.
• CSS ? style sheet format.
• DjVu ? for scanned images.
• EAS3 ? binary file format for floating point data
• ELF ? Executable and Linkable Format.
• Hierarchical Data Format ? Multi-platform data format for storing multidimensional arrays, among other data structures.
• NZB ? for multipart binary files on Usenet.
• NetCDF ? for scientific data.
• SDXF ? the Structured Data eXchange Format.
• SFV ? checksum.
• XML ? a general-purpose markup language.^[8]
  • RSS ? syndication.
• YAML ? human readable data serialization format.

See also

• Open format
• Open standard
• Free software
• Open source
• Open source codecs and containers
• Free protocol

References

External links

• Free File Format Definition
• Definition of Free Cultural Works

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