Here’s a case study of the problems with some proprietary technologies, vendor lock-in and ways around it: ‘…in testing the system the week before it was to “go live”, my client found that
the messages displayed to dispatchers were lacking 18 letters of the alphabet!
Locations in the facility could only be described with 10 digits plus A, B, C, D,
N, S, E and W, and even then they could only use eight of them!…’ Thanks to Adrian Midgely for this link.