WARNING, I'm going to do my Savonarola bit.
All the ranting against customs, morals, ethics and generic social
corruption goes here.
Ranting against immoral business practices goes here.
ANNOUNCEMENT:
Given a reasonable, yet short delay, within which Adobe Corporation
is given the opportunity of rectifying its policy in regard to the
availability to the general public of the ASV3 plug-in, I will take
the considerate risk to make available the ASV3 plug-in to the
general public through a server.
I encourage the greatest number to join forces into this move, while
stating that I will make this move independently of the number of
individuals constituting the coalition, with the strong hope and
intent that such a case will possibly make jurisprudence in the
likely event that Adobe Corporation will take legal action against
this move.
Those who wish to join the coalition should do this as individuals
and not as representatives of their respective companies. To assert
the physical identity of the acting agent, in order to not engage the
liability of the business entity that he or she may represent,
dedicated domains should be created.
Adobe's announcement constitutes a breach of promise. Its business
practices are in neat discordance with established or traditional
practices.
Adobe's recent change of commercial horizons is not a valid reason to
deprive the greatest number of the possibility to access goods that
have already been made freely available to an extremely wide number
of users; the latter group would be considered then as "first
arrived, first served" (an elitist, antidemocratic position which is
contradictory with the philosophy of Open Standards), a policy that
was not announced at the time when the product was made available,
nor by any subsequent announcement, and in fact in contrast with most
recent official announcements following the Adobe-Macromedia merger,
the latest announcement creating, in fact, disillusion from
legitimate expectations.
We are many to believe that the sole intent of Adobe's announcement
is that of damaging a technology which is now in competition with its
current commercial orientations. If Adobe has adopted, willingly or
unaware, the position of paladin of SVG and has now the intention, in
good or bad faith, of assuming an opposing, destructive role, the
international community has the right and duty to challenge, as
Adobe's behavior can unequivocally be considered treason. Adobe has
the right to abdicate but it must do so in a way that causes the
smallest possible damage to the community.
The collective loss for the community of companies, private and
public institutions, independent developers, writers, journalists and
evangelists, resulting from Adobe's fallacious behavior can be
quantified in terms of billions of US$.
We must remember at this point that SVG represents an Art, an Open
Source Standard, a Philosophic sub-discipline, a Credo and more; too
much in any case for its destiny to be in the hands of a small bunch
of ambiguous individuals with dubious morals and murky intentions. We
will not allow it and we hope American and, or international Justice
will not allow it.
This would be a terrific opportunity for the law to describe and set
to what extent the liability of a major corporation is engaged in
regard of the practice of not making timely legal announcements
regarding orientation policies; to define a satellite status for
independent developers and small companies, coercing large companies
to accept and assume their de facto tributary status, as opposed to
acting as autarchic governing bodies. Are we or are we not in a
democratic environment? Do not basic democratic principles also
apply to corporations to same extent? If so, isn't it about time that
people are given a minimum of protection against illicit, abusive and
unmeasured powers that multibillion companies bestow upon themselves?
That multibillion companies are able to regularly corrupt the
Executive is well known and seems to be inevitable as long as we keep
following an ultra Darwinist and ultra Capitalistic philosophy; but
are they also able to corrupt the Judiciary? What is left then to us
to regulate excesses? I'm perfectly aware that any Judge would
dismiss this argument as being tendentious, but this wouldn't make it
less true. Why then in some modern countries there has been since the
last twenty years or so a new, strong current in the Judiciary that
has been successfully claiming back total independence from the other
two State Powers?
Agreeing with the terms of use of a software product is proper and we
all do (*). But what happens then for a product that, although not in
the Public Domain, has been offered for free, when such product is
retired from distribution, while this free product is not obsolete,
and where the publisher declares its interest obsolete? Would anybody
care for free software running on old platforms being copied and
distributed against intellectual property laws, where such software
is subject to copyright? Such software circulates freely and to my
knowledge no company, except for very few pathetic cases, has been
suing anyone for distributing. In reality most companies have donated
their "obsolete" products.
Now we have Adobe who want to go solo, innocently declaring one of
their free products obsolete ("The SVG language and its adoption in
the marketplace have both matured to the point where it is no longer
necessary for Adobe to provide an SVG viewer." Who says so? This is a
totally arbitrary statement), interrupting its distribution
prematurely and with an unacceptably short notice, naively trying to
dissimulate in deceitful manner the reality that the anticipated
interruption has the scope of cutting the grass under the feet of the
current native implementation projects, not even counting with the
fact that Microsoft might not, after all, decide to implement SVG
native in Internet Explorer 8.
However, I understand very well if Adobe kept a sense of sourness
against all the criticism that ASV has gone through. That criticism
has never been justified. Most of it spun around the extensions; most
of those were added with the good intention of palliating to Netscape
4.7 deficiencies. It wasn't that much of a pain to audit past works,
or was it? Other proprietary extensions were perfectly within the
scope of the extensibility contemplated in and allowed by the
specification (please, let's not create a debate over possible
different interpretations of the SVG spec, thanks). What can be said
in addition? That ASV was and remains to this day by far the best and
fastest renderer, the only one that had reached maturity in terms of
completeness and rendering speed, and, last but not least, the plug-
in for Internet Explorer.
And that is where we have the big problem that Adobe attempt to
minimize in their statement. The native implementations cannot reach
the level of ASV in the short time span that Adobe have "decided " to
allow (Microsoft could of course, given the incredible means at their
disposal, but who will guarantee to us? Microsoft is another
capricious who only cares to make statements when they feel it's
useful to them).
We are tired of this game and we don't want to submit to this type of
tyranny anymore. I understand that by doing so Adobe can save a
considerable amount of money - perhaps even as much as $2.50/year?
by not having to keep the download page on their site. But Adobe's
finances is none of our concern, why should it be? We pay very good
money for their products (by the way, when is it that economic
regulators will finally force the software industry to comply with
what is a long established market law in vigor in all industries,
including the computer hardware industry, that wants that once the
development costs of a product have been absorbed the retail prices
are consequently and substantially reduced?).
All the arguments that I have exposed here can be corroborated by the
numerous posts on the subject. I skipped repeating or quoting those
arguments and proposals. It would be interesting, not to say
necessary, to make a compilation of selected quotes and then rebuild
this document in a more accurate and extensive manner.
Politically Correct, please, do not join.
Perhaps we have someone on this list with a legal background who
could help refining an official statement to be presented. If not,
then I will present the relevant portion of this letter in its actual
state.
This letter in its final and reduced form will be addressed to
recipients outside of this list and made public, so anyone who thinks
has relevant addresses to contribute is welcome.
Companies might wish to participate to the motion under a different
form to be defined, perhaps Mr. Ferraiolo's suggestion. A different
coat might be tailored to that need. Parallel action would help
screening this coalition.
Domenico Strazzullo
(*) However competent the lawyers who compose such documents may be,
at the end of the line it is always a Judge who has the prerogative
to statue on the validity of a unilateral agreement. In other words,
what precedes the lines "I accept the terms" "I don't accept the
terms" (read "I don't install") is often perfectly arbitrary and
abusive. In some cases it is a free or partisan interpretation of
existing laws. It only takes a good lawyer to bring out what another
good lawyer skipped, either voluntarily or out of ignorance. By
clicking "I accept" I am not necessarily bound to the terms, in case
of litigation, until an arbitrator, High Court Judge or Magistrate,
says the contrary, if vices are found in the compilation of those
terms.
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