* Evince is free software. I personally don't feel that the existence of non-free software keeps free software from developing.
You know this situation better than I do. However, retarding development of free software is not the only potential problem to be avoided. If we spend effort to make non-free software better (better technically; it can't get ethically better except by being free), and that encourages people to stick with it rather than switch to free software, we've scored an own-goal. * Poppler isn't able to render every single PDF out there (though we are getting better!) Having Acroread as a fallback means that users of Free systems will be able to get work done. Some may do that--but we should not suggest or encourage it. To do so would undercut the message that non-free software is an ethical problem. * The Evince team is writing a totally different application than Acroread. Acroread is a giant, fully-featured pdf viewer that supports every obscure feature that the PDF spec covers. We aim to provide a reader that's optimized for reading documents, and covers the sensible bulk of PDFs. What solution will we recommend in the free world for other PDF files? We can't recommend using Acroread. Is Poppler meant to handle all PDF files? (I don't know the relationship between Poppler and Evince.) * I know that our efforts stand on their own, and that in time, users who know nothing of licensing will pick Evince over Acroread. I hope so too, but we need not leave it to this alone. Let's teach users to value freedom, whenever we get the chance; then they will choose Evince over Acroread partly for the freedom, well before it developes enough technical advantages to win them that way. Meanwhile, I was told recently that there seem to be undocumented features in recent PDF files. Figuring them all out may be difficult. We shouldn't put all our hope onto outdoing Acroread technically. * For all we know, Acroread might be Free software someday. I'd love if it was a great product that they opened up instead of a poor one. It isn't impossible, but it is a very long shot--I don't think we should bet on it in our plans. Adobe is the company that had Dmitry Sklyarov put in prison, and they never apologized for this, or said they would not do the same thing again. _______________________________________________ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list