On Sat, Oct 22, 2005 at 09:01:53AM -0300, George White wrote: > Quoting Reinhard Kotucha <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > > > When Sebastian presented pdftex at Adobe, they had been amazed that > > pdftex can do things they cannot do with their own tools (I suppose > > that Hans Hagen provided some files). This was years ago, but > > meanwhile Thanh provided many microtypographical extensions. > > > > If things evolve in the future as they did in the past, I suppose that > > pdftex is not good PR for Adobe, it's more likely that they regard > > pdftex as a competitor. > > In the past, Adobe has fixed Reader bugs that were triggered by files > created with TeX (encodings using ASCII NUL, although TeX responded to the > bugs > with new encodings). Enlightened software vendors understand very well that > the > user community's investment in workflows forms the basis for long-term > success. > I suspect Adobe is happy to have the TeX community providing the tools to deal > with mathematical typesetting, as the commercial market is probably too small > in relation to the cost of developing/maintaining the tools. > > In my view, current intellectual property law misses the importance of the > user community. This creates a danger that users can loose their investment > in workflows through the demise of a vendor or outrageous price increases. > While I don't think Adobe has immediate plans to cash out on PDF, history > shows > that successful companies can fail (e.g., by ill-advised moves into areas > where > they have no competence), leaving intellectual property in limbo, or be taken > over by groups who will grab the cash and run. > > While there is currently little danger of Adobe doing anything to hurt pdftex > (and if pdftex was harmed as an unanticipated consequence of some other > action, Adobe would probably work to resolve the problem), there is no > protection for pdftex from some unrelated business catastrophe. In such an > event, pdftex users would be better off than users who rely entirely > on Adobe tools.
Current acrobat reader (well, it was at least a couple of years ago) licencing forbids it to be distributed alongside other pdf generating tools like pdftex, which is in big part why it was removed from non-free back then. Friendly, Sven Luther -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
