I feel antsy about proprietary formats about once every three years, when I buy a camera with a raw format or new body that's not yet supported by Adobe raw processors. (Sony RX-100 today.) I'm grumpy and complain about proprietary formats that add no value, wonder why everyone doesn't just get on the bandwagon for SOME common raw format. Then the update comes out for Adobe raw, suddenly I'm back to working with the multiple raw formats with no more thought about the file format than I would have if they were all jpg files... and the issue fades away.
I understand the concerns that some camera manufacturers may have about the current DNG being "Adobe DNG" having watched the period of jpg litigation. I understand the manufacturers wanting to have a proprietary format because somewhere deep inside they believe that some day, they're going to come up with something really brilliant where they need complete control over the raw file's capabilities. (Struggling to remember when that's last actually happened, but it's a possibility.) But as someone who, in his day job, works with applications that run under Unix, several forms of Linux, AIX, Solaris, Xenix (ok, I haven't seen Xenix in 20 years, but it used to be in the mix), I know it's possible to have a standard, with theoretically brilliant unique variations, and still provide superior interoperability and file consistency. So a real digital negative would not necessarily impede innovation even at the digital level.
Even more... My day job employer has donated some of its most interesting software application discoveries and patents to open source foundations, something that caused huge amounts of shock when it was first done, and continues today to confound peoples' thinking about intellectual property. (Trying to stay within the bounds of my day job's restrictions on what I say in public here...) Most of today's exciting massive data analytics and unstructured information processing use discoveries that were handed over to the public domain for free. Every competitor now has their own tweaks on those OS capabilities, and swears theirs are the best, but underneath the veneer code, there are common formats and processes - there have to be, or your tweak version will fall behind the progressive OS builds that add enormous stability and new functionality. Much of the world's infrastructure now is built on massive heaps of open source frameworks, file formats, and message formats of all sorts.
Give DNG to the Apache Foundation, or to someone who's got no tie or stake in Adobe's (or any other corporate entity's) success. Let people (including corporations with an interest in seeing new capabilities in the format) hack away at it and progress it in the managed form that OS frameworks and software follow. That might make it work. As my day job employer discovered a very long time ago, sometimes the best way to create positive innovation pressure in the market that is good for their own bottom line requires the whole world to be working on shaping foundational IP.
As long as the name "Adobe" appears within a few words of "DNG" in any discussion, DNG is likely to remain DOA as a common format.
But as of today... that doesn't affect me much, because Adobe has kept pace with the manufacturers' raw formats quite nicely. I'm almost unaware of how many raw formats populate my drive arrays. (But get to work on the RX-100...)