> Someone better tell Oracle, Sun, Microsoft, and GNU. All of these groups produce applications with non-portable data files. Supporting portable data files is exceptionally difficult, and it's usually easier (if the data is necessary) to simply write a convertion tool.
Got a source for which Sun/GNU applications in particular use non-portable data files? Considering both organizations provide applications that must work on a variety of platforms, I don't think you're correct.
Supporting portable data files is easy as falling over. In case you haven't noticed, there's no such thing as a PC-only .jpg or Mac-only .zip