What many are not saying/understanding is that Adobe created DNG to benefit Adobe.
And your perception doesn't match my knowledge of the actual history...
Adobe didn't create DNG, Thomas Knoll did. At the time Thomas was tired of seeing how poorly the camera makers were at formulating both the metadata as well as the manner of packaging it inside a container.
Do you remember the first time Canon offered their pro digital camera, the 1D in late 2001? Remember what the file format extension for the raw was? It was a .tif. Now, Canon thought it was ok the use tiff because, well it was publicly documented and free to use but what Canon failed to grasp is that any software that could read tiffs would try to open the file and it would successfully open the embedded jpg thumbnail. The problem was if you saved the file as a tiff, it would save the jpeg thumbnail over writing the original raw file.
I know this was a problem because at the time I was a Canon Explorer of Light and was due to get an early camera to play with. Unfortunately (or fortunately for me), several other photographers got the camera first. A well known celeb photographer shot a bunch of celeb shots that were ruined because a digital tech opened the raw files into Photoshop (before Photoshop supported raw files) to check them and didn't realize by saving them, overwrote the originals. It required that photographer to do a reshoot...when the head of Canon USA found out about the problem, he was livid that the engineers were so stupid that they didn't anticipated using the .tif extension as a problem...it worked fine with the Canon software.
Ya see, when Canon left the Nikon/Canon/Kodak DCS camera club, Canon had to bootstrap a lot of digital engineering in a big hurry...seems that a little thing like raw file format extensions would cause any problems. They didn't really know what they were doing.
Canon then started using CR2 as their extension.
It was against this background that Thomas, who at the time worked with Dave Coffin and leveraged some of his work in Camera Raw, started to realize that somebody needed to at least attempt the creation of a standardized raw file format. He created DNG as an example of how a raw file format could be created and documented. Yes, Adobe allowed him to do it (and he got paid to do it) but what you need to understand about Adobe is if Thomas thinks it's important to do something, Adobe is pretty good and letting Thomas do what he thinks needs to be done.
You don't really think Adobe has gotten much of anything besides grief for creating DNG do you? DNG has not made Adobe's life (or Thomas' life) easier...it's actually added work to Thomas' workload because he has to oversee the DNG specs and SDK and DNG Converter. The job of reverse engineering still has to be done because only a few camera makers have adopted DNG. Those that have have received the benefits of not needing to spec a file format.
Adobe has already offered DNG to the ISO for use in an upcoming TIFF-EP file format update (things like ISO changes takes a long time so I don't know where that stands). I do know that all of the major camera makers use
TIFF-EP and that TIFF-EP was derived from TIFF-6 and Adobe inherited the file format from Aldus and was given over to the ISO as an open standard.
The funny thing is some people think raw file formats contain "secret" stuff...they really don't. Everything in a raw file format can be reverse engineered and decoded–even when things may be encrypted...the claim that camera makers would have to give up private and proprietary secrets to use DNG is a spurious claim. DNG, like TIFF-EP and TIFF-6 provide standardized methods of encoding private maker notes and data.
The main reason that I'm aware of that the camera makers DON'T want to use DNG is that they simply don't want to be told what to do. They don't want to adhere to a standard if they don't have to. And the fact that the industry at large allows the camera makers to get away with using undocumented, proprietary raw file formats give them little reason to adopt DNG.
The fact is, DNG has already done the job Thomas really wanted it to do...teach the camera makers by example, how to create and use a well formed raw file format.
