Adam McGreggor writes: > PDF has been an open standard (as much as 'open standards' are)
Some open standards (specifically, IETF standards) really are. However, ISO standards rarely come up to that level, since all ISO standards must be vetted by national or regional organizations (and ECMA is about as bad as they come when it comes to kowtowing to corporate interests). > since July 2008. I stand corrected (I've been out of Ghostscript development as long as Peter Deutsch has been out of it, so haven't paid attention to the ins and outs of PDF). Be that as it may, all of the open source PDF tools I know of are pretty much crap compared to Adobe's tools. For practical purposes it's a binary blob. If you know better, I'd love to hear about it. > Hasn't NT been End of Life-d now for over 10 years? Not the point. The point is that Adobe used its market power to refuse to fix a bug that took the whole system down, and it wasn't a MS-DOG-based system, it was a system that cleared the DoD's "Orange Book" standard for security. I see nothing in Adobe's current behavior to indicate that it has become more open since. (The opening of PDF is consistent with cost-cutting in the face of an "innovator's dilemma" in the PDF market and Adobe's move into dynamic presentation like its acquisition of Macromedia.) > "[These atrocities] -- they all happened, and they did not happen > any the less because the Daily Telegraph has suddenly found out > about them when it is five years too late." > -- George Orwell (Looking Back on the Spanish War, 1942) What an apropros quote for a discussion of Adobe's "openness"! Steve _______________________________________________ Mailman-Developers mailing list Mailman-Developers@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-developers Mailman FAQ: http://wiki.list.org/x/AgA3 Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-developers%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: https://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-developers/archive%40jab.org Security Policy: http://wiki.list.org/x/QIA9
