Editing Software patent (section)

===Compatibility===
There are a number of high-profile examples where the patenting of a data exchange standards forced another programming group to introduce an alternative format. For instance, the [[Portable Network Graphics]] (PNG) format was largely introduced to avoid the [[Graphics Interchange Format]] (GIF) patent problems, and [[Ogg]] [[Vorbis]] to avoid [[MP3]]. If it is discovered that these new suggested formats are themselves covered by existing patents, the final result may be a large number of incompatible formats. Creating such formats and supporting them costs money and creates inconvenience to users.