Comments on: Further Major Kudos to Adobe on Open PDF, AJAX http://www.redmonk.com/jgovernor/2007/02/01/further-major-kudos-to-adobe-on-open-pdf-ajax/ An industry analyst blog looking at software ecosystems and convergence Sat, 22 Nov 2008 20:15:31 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.6.3 By: Andrew Shebanow http://www.redmonk.com/jgovernor/2007/02/01/further-major-kudos-to-adobe-on-open-pdf-ajax/#comment-18978 Andrew Shebanow Sat, 03 Feb 2007 16:49:08 +0000 http://www.redmonk.com/jgovernor/2007/02/01/further-major-kudos-to-adobe-on-open-pdf-ajax/#comment-18978 I think that at this point there are enough implementations of PDF to qualify under Sam Ruby's definition. He doesn't say that all those implementations must be open source, just one of them. I personally think iText qualifies - I've used it myself before I came to Adobe. As for conformance suites, I agree this is an area where more work is needed. That is why I brought up the issue in response to Rosyna's question. I personally look forward to seeing a good conformance solution come out of the ISO effort. I think that at this point there are enough implementations of PDF to qualify under Sam Ruby’s definition. He doesn’t say that all those implementations must be open source, just one of them. I personally think iText qualifies - I’ve used it myself before I came to Adobe.

As for conformance suites, I agree this is an area where more work is needed. That is why I brought up the issue in response to Rosyna’s question. I personally look forward to seeing a good conformance solution come out of the ISO effort.

]]> By: Luis Villa http://www.redmonk.com/jgovernor/2007/02/01/further-major-kudos-to-adobe-on-open-pdf-ajax/#comment-17915 Luis Villa Fri, 02 Feb 2007 04:48:28 +0000 http://www.redmonk.com/jgovernor/2007/02/01/further-major-kudos-to-adobe-on-open-pdf-ajax/#comment-17915 A full open source community pdf implementation seems unlikely; lots of open source apps implement partial pdf support (abiword, evince/kpdf, OOo all come to mind), but I'd guess that most people just don't find pdf interesting enough to justify implementing the entire spec. If it does happen, it'll be from someone like Novell or IBM who has a corporate itch to scratch. A full open source community pdf implementation seems unlikely; lots of open source apps implement partial pdf support (abiword, evince/kpdf, OOo all come to mind), but I’d guess that most people just don’t find pdf interesting enough to justify implementing the entire spec. If it does happen, it’ll be from someone like Novell or IBM who has a corporate itch to scratch.

]]> By: James Ward http://www.redmonk.com/jgovernor/2007/02/01/further-major-kudos-to-adobe-on-open-pdf-ajax/#comment-17680 James Ward Thu, 01 Feb 2007 20:41:17 +0000 http://www.redmonk.com/jgovernor/2007/02/01/further-major-kudos-to-adobe-on-open-pdf-ajax/#comment-17680 Hi James, There are numerous Open Source libraries that read and write PDF. I use a number of them on Linux - Evince most frequently to view PDFs. I don't totally buy that definition of Open Standards though. While I agree that Open Standards work best when there is an Open Source RI (see Geir's recently blog on this), there are/were plenty of "Open Standards" without Open Source implementations. With the exception of the Lynx browser (which no one really used at the time), before Netscape went Open Source, were there any Open Source Browsers? Would this have made the W3C's HTML standard not an Open Standard? Geir's Blog: http://blogs.codehaus.org/people/geir/archives/001507_another_example_of_why_open_source_ris_for_specs_is_a_good_thing.html -James Hi James,

There are numerous Open Source libraries that read and write PDF. I use a number of them on Linux - Evince most frequently to view PDFs.

I don’t totally buy that definition of Open Standards though. While I agree that Open Standards work best when there is an Open Source RI (see Geir’s recently blog on this), there are/were plenty of “Open Standards” without Open Source implementations. With the exception of the Lynx browser (which no one really used at the time), before Netscape went Open Source, were there any Open Source Browsers? Would this have made the W3C’s HTML standard not an Open Standard?

Geir’s Blog:
http://blogs.codehaus.org/people/geir/archives/001507_another_example_of_why_open_source_ris_for_specs_is_a_good_thing.html

-James

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