>  You don't understand. MS may one day decide that they want an annual
> fee for every Word document a company has in their computers, and they
> may get away with it.

Sure, but they'll only get away with it if it is a trivially small amount to 
most customers.  Otherwise people would stop using it and MS would lose 
market share and profit.  Of course the shareholders know this so they would 
never let such a thing happen.

That's the protection you have using MS products, you know that there are a 
large number of people with very large financial interests in how the 
company performs, not just a passing technical interest in the code of 
certain progams.

> That's because the format is closed, proprietary
> and owned by MS. An open source project just cannot do that. The open
> source project does not own the format and thus cannot impose any fees
> on it.

Sure, but that risk is pretty small as mentioned above.  The far greater 
risk is that development/support becomes very slow or stops altogether, 
because nobody has any financial interest in the project.

I've seen it happen so often, where developers get distracted by other 
things (both in the software world and IRL), development goes very slowly, 
and then finally development is stopped.  Because they have no financial 
incentive to continue development, there is absolutely nothing stopping them 
just leaving one day.  That would be impossible to happen at MS.

>  As for stopping developement, have you ever heard of people having
> problems importing old Word documents into newer versions of the program?
> I have.

Very occasionally yes, but usually it's because they haven't installed the 
right filters to read them.    Have you ever heard of an open source project 
essentially dying because nobody is developing it?  I have.

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