[OSM-newbies] Open vs. Closed geo formats

[Akkana Peck]

I'm giving a talk on open formats and why people should use them,
and there will be some USGS people in the audience. I'm comfortable
with talking about formats like Word and Excel and so forth,
but I'm very new to GIS and I still find the list of formats
overwhelming. I'd like to be able to give them a table, like
"If you're thinking of making your data available in this
proprietary format, please consider this open format instead."

A helpful person on #osm pointed me to
http://www.gdal.org/ogr/ogr_formats.html
http://www.gdal.org/formats_list.html
for vector and raster formats respectively, so I'm trying
to start from there and figure out which of the formats
are open vs. closed and what might substitute for what.


Has anybody already made such a table? I haven't been able to
find one on the web.  If it doesn't exist already, I'll try to make
one, but I'd much rather use info created by someone who knows more.

Thanks for any pointers!

	...Akkana