Dear all, On 01/15/2013 04:04 PM, Jason G. Karlin wrote:
In what way is PDF proprietary? It was officially released as an open standard on July 1, 2008.
with no presumption to be exhaustive, to criticize #pdftribute initiative or to talk on Swartz's behalf, the 'PDF issue' is subtler and more complex than it seems. Yes, PDF v 1.7 specifications (along with prior versions) were released by Adobe and approved by ISO as a standard in 2008 [1]. However, ISO formally certifies "standards" only, not "Open standards". Indeed, as of today, no widely and legally-recognized definition of an open standard exists [2]. Usually (and simply speaking) an open standard is a standard whose specifications can be implemented royalty-free. This requires that there are either no patents covering the specifications or that such patents are granted on a royalty-free basis. PDF specifications are covered by several patents. Most of these (not all) are held by Adobe. PDF v1.7 is considered an open standard because, contextually to ISO standardization process, Adobe released a royalty-free license covering all the patents it held on PDF v1.7 specifications [3]. Since 2008 Adobe continued developing its own specifications for PDF later versions, but only a few of these PDF 'updates' were either submitted to ISO or accepted by ISO as standards. This resulted in two different sets of PDF specifications which are out-of-sync with each other (i.e. ISO PDF specs. and Adobe PDF specs.) Furthermore, Adobe never renewed/extended (at least not until recently, not sure if things have changed) the royalty-free license for its patents to cover also the newer PDF specifications. Therefore, yes *PDF v1.7* can be considered an open standard, but strictly speaking later versions are either "not open" (ISO ones) or "not standards" (Adobe ones). Basically, this is why only Adobe can afford (efficiently) implementing a PDF reader which provides all shiny & advanced features such as editing, highlighting, revision comparison etc etc (and why you have to pay for its Pro version). These may appear nitpickings to most of us, but I suspect (my guesswork here) they were not marginal to an activist hacker. Sorry for the lengthy-techy and slight off-topic reply, just provided some clarifications. Best regards, Giacomo [1] http://pdfreaders.org/os.en.html (Self-disclosure, yes I was loosely involved with this initiative, that is why I'm acquainted with the issue and why I referenced this resource website) [2] http://fsfe.org/activities/os/def.html [3] Since this royalty-free license only applies to Adobe's patents on PDF, then technically there is `the Sword of Damocles' pending on PDF v1.7: if the other patents' owners decide to enforce their patents on PDF v1.7, this would become just 'another standard', no longer an open one. -- PhD Candidate Doctoral School in Sociology and Social Research - Information Systems and Organizations University of Trento, Italy