Lol, dude, Word files have been readable by open source tools since forever. MS Word itself supports many different formats including OpenDocument, so there is absolutely no problem with being able to read them in 30 years.
MS Word supports version control, but patches are a terrible idea for documents. Again, the whole point of a document is to make it easy to read, so the formatting becomes a huge pain in the ass for a patch. Patches are designed for lines of code, not the formatting, layout and content of rich text documents. Trying to force documentation to work like code is making the computer happy, rather than the computer making people happy. It's the opposite of what technology is supposed to be for. Think about what you're spending your life on. You gonna look back when you're 80 and think, gosh, I'm so glad I spent those extra hours going back and forth with a dozen people on the internet to try to approve an update to documentation? I'm so glad I spent an extra hour tweaking this program code so that this document would have an embedded table aligned right? I'm so glad I had to write a separate program to be able to format this Markdown Table so that I could actually edit and save it so that it renders?
Docs should be living / not require requests for patching. Humans should be entrusted to just update a document immediately, with a log and comments to allow reverting entries only if necessary. Aka a wiki (and a WYSIWYG one at that). The whole purpose of patch requests is not to gatekeep information, it's to make sure a change doesn't blow up a program. Documentation isn't a program, just change the document.
MS Word supports version control, but patches are a terrible idea for documents. Again, the whole point of a document is to make it easy to read, so the formatting becomes a huge pain in the ass for a patch. Patches are designed for lines of code, not the formatting, layout and content of rich text documents. Trying to force documentation to work like code is making the computer happy, rather than the computer making people happy. It's the opposite of what technology is supposed to be for. Think about what you're spending your life on. You gonna look back when you're 80 and think, gosh, I'm so glad I spent those extra hours going back and forth with a dozen people on the internet to try to approve an update to documentation? I'm so glad I spent an extra hour tweaking this program code so that this document would have an embedded table aligned right? I'm so glad I had to write a separate program to be able to format this Markdown Table so that I could actually edit and save it so that it renders?
Docs should be living / not require requests for patching. Humans should be entrusted to just update a document immediately, with a log and comments to allow reverting entries only if necessary. Aka a wiki (and a WYSIWYG one at that). The whole purpose of patch requests is not to gatekeep information, it's to make sure a change doesn't blow up a program. Documentation isn't a program, just change the document.