Thanks configure for the heads up on this one.
After months of closed-door negotiations, open source developers are now sure of royalty-free access to one of the most significant new storage formats of the future: Mount Rainier.
Mount Rainier is a CD format devised with the goal of replacing CD-RWs and - eventually - floppy and superfloppy formats, such as Iomega"s Zip disks.
Unlike today"s rewriteable optical disks, Mount Rainier CDs will allow users to drag-and-drop data to the disk, dispensing with the need for slow formatting operations, and will provide similar error correction for removable media. So Mount Rainier CDs will simply behave like hard drives or floppies, and the format applies to rewriteable DVDs too, potentially making it a core medium for enterprise storage.
Mount Rainier is needed because CD-RWs "are still too complicated to use for most users," says Philips" Eggert Gudmundsson.