On Monday 26 April 2004 02:53, Mahesh T. Pai wrote: > Ihab A.B. Awad said on Sun, Apr 25, 2004 at 07:37:06PM -0700,: > > Should the government be thereby institutionalizing this format > > (Adobe Acrobat PDF) to the benefit of the one corporation (Adobe) > > that provides tools to properly edit it? ... > > FSF India says the government should not use the portable document > format. See http://www.gnu.org.in/philosophy/mitrules.html
Thank you for the link ... I didn't know about that! <rant> Actually, with all due respect to FSF India's opinion -- which is pretty much what I would expect from FSF anywhere -- I claim the US tax agencies' policy fails an even weaker standard: that of the availability of more than one source for the software required to use the format. The killer here is that you *can* use the PDF form -- but you just can't save an *editable* copy without paying $$$ to Adobe. So extra taxpayer money was spent creating PDF forms (as opposed to simply providing PDF to be printed and filled out in hardcopy). Then, to use this taxpayer-sponsored work, you end up shoehorned into the marketing campaign of the one and only source of software for it. </rant> Peace, Ihab -- Ihab A.B. Awad Snr Scientific Programmer, Dept of Genetics Stanford University -- license-discuss archive is at http://crynwr.com/cgi-bin/ezmlm-cgi?3