[pdftex] Adobe Battles Backward-Compatibility Woes

[Allin Cottrell]

On Wed, 15 Mar 2006, holop ferenc wrote:

> hmm, Martin Schröder said that
>> http://www.pdfzone.com/article2/0,1895,1937092,00.asp
>> http://www.pdfzone.com/article2/0,1895,1937170,00.asp
>
> very interesting read, thanks.

Yes, interesting.  Here's a particularly intriguing nugget:

"This brings us to the eternal debate that rages on PDF-related 
message boards: Should Adobe make the PDF spec a totally open 
standard developed jointly by Adobe and an industry-wide standards 
committee?"

"One side of the debate says that since public institutions such as 
governments are legislating the use of PDF as their exclusive format 
for electronic documents, shouldn't these technologies be public 
property? ..."

"The other side says no way should PDF and Acrobat be entrusted to 
Joe Everyprogrammer. Basement developers will kill PDF faster than 
you can say 'Apple Lisa.'"

"A commercial company like Adobe, with its army of software 
engineers, will make a far better product than any consortium of 
volunteers devoting their spare time to concocting Acrobat and PDF 
products."

I'm not quite sure to whom one should attribute the sentiments in 
the last two paragraphs above, but you have to ask what rock they've 
been living under for the past ten years.  I guess they haven't yet 
heard about GNU/Linux, Apache, OpenOffice.org, xpdf, pdftex or the 
other legions of high-quality free, open-source software that are 
setting the standards of excellence these days.

"Joe Everyprogrammer", indeed!

Allin Cottrell