When is an open standard not open?
It seems that Adobe reserves the right to tell some folks PDF is open, and other folks that it isn't. For years, PDF has been a standard portable (and open) format on the internet. Many ISV's and open source projects have read the statements on Adobe's web site (PDF File here) that seem to say that PDF is open and you just have to meet the standard and have some Adobe info in your copyright (OK, so IANAL, but that's what it looked like to me). I'd guess I wasn't the only one since the OpenOffice people, the GhostScript project, and several ISV's who sell add-ins or printer drivers to produce PDF files seem to have thought the same.
Along comes Microsoft trying to add support for output to PDF into Office 2007. All of a sudden it isn't an open format that anyone can implement anymore. At least it seems Microsoft can't without Adobe's permissions which it seems inclined to withhold. They must have been quoting Captain Barbosa from Pirates of the Carribean, the Curse of the Black Pearl where he said "I'm disinclined to acquiesce to your request. Means no." Argh and all that.
Now obviously there are two sides to this one. Maybe Adobe is worried that some ISV's will go under if MS provides this functionality out of the box for Office 2007. Maybe they are worried that Acrobat Professional sales will fall once people realize there are other ways to produce basic PDF files. Maybe Adobe is worried that MS will kill off all of the other PDF writers, then declare the PDF as dead since there is nobody making writers anymore, then drop support for it in favor of Metro (XPS). Who knows?
The bottom line for me as a customer of Microsoft's and as someone who admittedly passionately dislikes Adobe's software (due to the difficulty of installing and managing them in a LUA environment) this really leaves me thinking even worse of Adobe. The funny thing is, this may be all Microsoft's fault - but I don't even care. I want the ability to write to PDF's without installing some software that won't install properly, won't upgrade or patch correctly, and tries to run regedit behind the scenes every time you launch it (yes, I combined 2 or 3 Adobe products there, but you get the idea).
Some references:
Brian Jones Blog
Another perspective
Anyway, it looks like for now MS plans to still have this feature as a download. Hopefully that will remain an option.
Posted
Jun 02 2006, 09:51 AM
by
Jerry
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