[EMAIL PROTECTED] (John Sankey) writes:
> I am curious as to why any GNU project would even think of using
> PDF.
I was actually who started this discussion, and I was surprised this
aspect of the problem wasn't discussed earlier.
> It's proprietary to Adobe, copyrighted by them, subject to change or
> withdrawal by them at any time, and some aspects are patented. It is
> designed from square one to allow the restriction of use of documents
> by various codes. (I realize that they can be bypassed by any
> competent OCR program.) In short, it is in exactly the position that
> GIF was before Compuserve suddenly reversed its free policy on it
> and, successfully, demanded payment for its use.
>
> I understand that PostScript is now legally considered free from
> ownership restriction, so can be used by us with no risk of being
> restricted later.
>
> Where am I wrong in this?
As far as I know, you're not, but the GNU project is distributing the
ghostscript that supports pdf reading, so maybe Richard Stallman knows
something we don't.
I did take a quick look at the gnu website, and didn't see a
discussion of the problem. I would be interested if someone does have
a good answer to this question.
--
Laura (mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] , http://www.world.std.com/~lconrad/ )
(617) 661-8097
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