In theory it's more compatible. It's open source.. kind of. Adobe issued a royalty free licence for the format.. but they can also change that at any time. It's only more compatible than say.. cr2 when other software developers stop supporting whatever raw format you happen to have saved on your computer. So in ten years, if cr2 isn't supported on the latest software the theory is that DNG will still be in use. Of course, you can always convert to DNG when that happens.