The Fellowship of the Free Software Foundation Europe is proud to announce its latest initiative: pdfreaders.org, a site providing information about PDF with links to Free Software PDF readers for all major operating systems.
"Interoperability, competition and choice are primary benefits of Open Standards that translate into vendor-independence and better value for money for customers," says FSFE president Georg Greve. "Although many versions of PDF offer all these benefits for formatted text and documents, files in PDF formats typically come with information that users need to use a specific product. pdfreaders.org provides an alternative to highlight the strengths of PDF as an Open Standard."
The coordinators of pdfreaders.org, Hannes Hauswedell and Jan-Hendrik Peters, are pleased to present the latest revision of the site with short and compact information how users can seize the full benefits of both Open Standards and Free Software.
"Free Software gives us control over the software we use, and Open Standards give us control over our data and allow implementations by many different groups," explains Jan-Hendrik Peters. "We wanted to show that with the Portable Document Format people can have both."
Hannes Hauswedell adds: "Similar to a Free Software project we started off with an idea, provided a first implementation, received lots of feedback, and worked that into a better version of the site. We are grateful to all the people who got involved. This was a collaborative effort that would not have been possible without all the contributors."
"The site offers buttons in several languages that we encourage everyone to put next to PDF files offered on their sites," explains Matthias Kirschner, FSFE's Fellowship Coordinator. "We hope that in a year from now, no PDF is offered without the vendor-independent alternative buttons of pdfreaders.org."