[free-sklyarov] DMCA/FREE DMITRY Flyers - IGNORE FIRST

[Izel Sulam]

xyz at kalifornia.com xyz at kalifornia.com wrote:

>Yes, PDF is evil, adobe sucks, but unfortunately some of us still have to
>deal with it until the world changes.  Kinko's will probably be the last.

I disagree with this. pdf is not evil. Adobe no longer owns the open pdf 
standard in any meaningful way. Adobe and the open pdf standard have been 
decoupled sufficiently, such that even if all Adobe products and even Adobe 
itself disappeared off the planet tomorrow, we could still do lots of 
wonderful and useful things with existing pdf files and third party pdf 
tools.

There is a healthy tradition of companies seeing value in open standards 
and opening what were previously closed standards to the entire IT 
community. There is also a parallel healthy tradition (and legal act) of 
clean-room reverse engineering of closed standards to figure out a standard 
and build competing products, when the company with the closed standard is 
not as cooperative. These two traditions in tandem have given us such 
useful open standards as Postscript, pdf, Flash, Napster/OpenNap, ICQ, etc.

I do encourage people to actively boycott Adobe products, but pdf is no 
longer an Adobe product or standard. pdf is an open standard, and there are 
a zillion software tools out there, some closed source, some open source, 
some free, some Free, and some neither, which produce and process pdf files 
in all kinds of useful ways.

Thanks.
- izel