In a post that serves as a nice complement to my recent musings on Open Source Tools, Karl Voit notes that Microsoft is discontinuing OneNote. Although he’s too polite to say so directly, if you’re a OneNote user, you have no one to blame but yourself. OneNote suffers from all the disadvantages that I discussed in my Open Source Tools post: it runs on someone else’s computer, uses a proprietary file format, and, as Voit’s post reminds us, is subject to discontinuance at someone else’s whim.
Not being a Windows user, I’ve never used or even seen OneNote but I have read about it in Bell and Gemmell’s Total Recall. That’s the book that got me interested living a (more) digital life and eventually led me to Evernote. Like OneNote, Evernote’s purpose is to store all your data, whether it’s a Web page, a note, some audio, or whatever. Like OneNote it has a proprietary file format, runs on someone else’s server, and could be gone tomorrow. I no longer use it although I still pay for it and have a few notebooks containing material that I mostly don’t care about very much.
My solution for replacing these proprietary and, in the end, dangerous-to-use services is the same as Voit’s: switch to Org mode. Unlike OneNote and Evernote, Org runs on your own machine, is open source so it will always be there for you, and, most importantly, stores its data as plain text1. The data is readable by any application that knows about text.
Voit makes the case for Org mode in his post but by now we2 should all be familiar with it. For most of us, what’s required is to import any data we care about into Org so we no longer have to worry about what third parties are planning to do with their products.