OME-TIFF is insufficient to my organization's needs, so we provide our own format instead. You'll support it via Bio-Formats anyway, right?
Such an attitude does not serve the best interests of the community, nor is it likely to be advantageous to you, ultimately. Supporting OME-TIFF directly will earn good karma points with your users/customers, while providing yet another impenetrable, incompatible format that makes your users feel trapped and powerless will certainly earn some bad karma.
As OME-TIFF becomes more prevalent, users will increasingly demand direct support for it at acquisition time. It makes more sense to provide this support yourself, rather than rely on a third party such as Bio-Formats to convert the data after the fact.
It may be that OME-XML does not encompass every piece of information you wish to record. However, you can work with the community to extend the specification to accommodate your needs. There are advantages to leveraging the community's efforts:
- Your developers will spend their time more efficiently, and you will produce a more versatile final product. Though interfacing with the community will require some time investment, you will easily regain any time lost by harnessing community code, and your end result will be both more powerful and more maintainable than otherwise.
- You will save on support, since many types of support requests will be directed at the community rather than at you specifically. Of course, you will still need to fix bugs in your software. But you will have help from external developers with tasks such as fixing bugs in Bio-Formats and extending the OME-XML specification, whereas if you develop your own proprietary solution, all of these support tasks become your organization's sole responsibility.
- You will be recognized as a progressive, forward-thinking organization dedicated to improving available microscopy tools.
