Dave Coffin, the man who reverse engineered the RAW file formats of most cameras and makes his extractor dcRAW available as open source (mentioned here before), says:
A firestorm of controversy recently erupted when Thomas Knoll of Adobe accused Nikon of encrypting the white balance data in the D2X and D2Hs cameras, thus preventing Adobe from fully supporting these cameras.
I cracked this encryption on April 15, and updated dcraw.c and parse.c on April 17. So "dcraw -w" now works correctly with all Nikon cameras.
This is not a new problem. Phase One, Sony, Foveon, and Canon all apply some form of encryption to their raw files. Dcraw decodes them all -- you can easily find decryption code by searching for the ^ operator.
Compression is not encryption. Phase One and Sony do encryption only. Kodak does compression only. Canon, Nikon, and Foveon compress the image data and encrypt some of the metadata.
And all of this is not entirely new. Neither that some Nikon RAW versions carry preprocessed instead of raw data nor that each vendor has a different understanding of what RAW is and of how a RAW file should be composed.
Naturally, camera vendors try to establish camera-specific RAW formats with camera-specific metadata fields as a selling point. Paired with camera-specific RAW extraction software, they promise better development results than a generic RAW extractor that does not know the sensor characteristics in all details could deliver.
In theory, this is true, in practice, experience says it is not. So the real reason for sticking to propietary RAW formats is a different one: using a standard, well documented file format could help third parties to turn the digital camera into a commodity of photo editing software - not exactly of interest to a camera vendor.
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