New Zealand (South Island)
Seth Kenlon is a UNIX geek, free culture advocate, independent multimedia artist, and D&D nerd. He has worked in the film and computing industry, often at the same time. He is one of the maintainers of the Slackware-based multimedia production project Slackermedia.
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ownCloud user here, since version 5 or earlier. Amazing project, highly recommended.
Thanks for reading the article!
On ODT:
I did not include ODT because it did not occur to me to include it. I like the idea of using ODT as a quick-and-dirty ebook format; sorry I left it out!
On Ebooks:
Don't get too caught up in the modern ebook market when looking for definitions of the term "ebook". Ebooks were around long before e-readers existed, and many of us were reading books electronically (electronic books / e-books / ebooks) long before anyone thought to develop a special format. So I'm arguing that yes, plain text, RTF, and ODT can all be ebook formats if that's how they are being used, just as a handwritten manuscript is a "book" with or without mass publication or fancy binding.
On RTF:
The original draft of this article did include RTF, but we chose not to include it because it's functionally equivalent to something a lot more elegant (like .fb2) but with an uglier spec (compare a 'hello world' in RTF to a 'hello world' in XML). RTF is being abandoned by Microsoft, and it was never open sourced (it is subject to an "open promise") so its validity as an "open" file format is debatable; programmers reverse-engineering something until MS promises not to persecute them for doing so is not exactly the same thing as a developer posting the spec online out of the desire for people to know what it is that they are using.
On fb2:
Yes, .fb2 is open. It is a schema for XML, sort of like Docbook. There is no further "source" or claim of ownership that requires an "open promise". The full schema is posted online at http://gribuser.ru/xml/fictionbook/2.0/xsd/FictionBook2.xsd and is available for anyone to use or modify (although, if you modify it, it's no longer fictionbook, just like docbook is no longer docbook if you change it). If it were proprietary, then its schema would not be available, but it could probably be reverse-engineered from the resulting XML source; but none of this is the case. The schema was published by the developer, Dmitry, for everyone to use.
This is pretty standard practise for schemas, though I guess the question of how schemas are licensed might make for an interesting topic for an article by a legal geek [not me], sometime. Its author, Dmitry Gribov, has a website and email address that might provide further clarification for the very curious.