#13 VCS contains files with non-free document formats
The VCS contains several files with non-free file formats, for example, spreadsheets in Microsoft Excel format. While these formats have been reverseengineered well enough to be read by some open source software, in general they should be completely avoided in an open-source project.
An alternative and highly acceptable set of file formats is the open and standard OpenDocument format written by almost all open source office-suite programs, including the one with LibreOffice (formerly OpenOffice).
These programs can be used on any operating system, so are highly perferred over proprietary tools. A conversion can be done simply by opening the existing files and re-saving in an open format.
(This obviously does not appoly in cases where a reverse engineered non-free file format must be used in order to correctly interoperate with a critical tool, such as the various netlist outputs that PHDL creates.)
Discussion
Anonymous
I've deleted several non-essential files (such as imports from CSV files, or copyrighted vendor spreadsheets) that didn't add any value.
A few others (such as presentations) I've converted to OpenDocument format and left the original copies (for now).
Besides the above mentioned untouched files, I believe there is still more stuff to clean out, so I'm not closing this bug yet.