Ranging a little farther within the subject of alternative programs, we've had several threads on "archiving" of "stuff," but my search didn't turn up the ones where I made my most brilliant contributions, so I'll put in the note here about the recent item:

Vatican goes high-tech to preserve fragile ancient tomes
Library tu
rns to NASA for system to put 1,800-year-old manuscripts in digital format

One of the world's oldest libraries in Rome faces a huge problem — how to preserve 1,800-year-old manuscripts in a digital format that's readable for next-generation computers. A format designed to store images taken by satellites and orbital telescopes such as the Hubble Space Telescope could offer a solution to the Holy See's Vatican Library.

Archivists have already begun scanning the fragile, ancient tomes in the Vatican's collection with software that can transform old pages pressed against glass into an accurate, flat digital image. Such images saved in the flexible image transport system (FITS) format — designed by NASA and European space scientists in the 1970s — will allow computers built even 100 years from now to decode whatever information is stored.
[end]

A quick look for information on the FITS format found that it's primarily intended for preserving images, and I didn't find much of anything about whether it (or the methods used in it) could be applied to other things like editable text, music, or video.

I also failed to find anything that told exactly how "anyone" who wants to recover the images a hundred years hence would do it, or what hardware/skill sets would be required.

Perhaps one of our astronomy buffs has used it and could offer comments.(?)

I've avoided using the "native" formats of the image handling programs I have (mainly because I might not be able to afford updates of "back-compaitible versions with in my timespan)," for archiving images; and idiot that I am have selected the "minimally compressed jpg" format for nearly all such saved info. My rationale was that jpg has been around longer than most other competitive forms, and appears to remain "robust" for now, permitting the assumption that some program should be able to open them within the time span within which anyone might want to. There are, unfortunately, about a dozen defined "flavors" of jpg and the specification allows "tailoring" to create additional variants; and not all programs open all the different ones I've found in circulation. (A couple of fairly popular programs save a ".jpg" that can't be opened by most other programs.)

I suppose it comes down to "what alternative image editors" are we using?" for this thread.

John