I have received a letter from the Chief Executive of Angus Council (Scotland)
in response to our request that they remove advertising for Adobe Reader.
It would be great if someone on the list would give a nice response. The email
address to use is chiefexec(a)angus.gov.uk. If in doubt about what to say, send
a draft for comments before sending the final copy to the Council. Let others
know when you _begin_ drafting so that there is no duplication of effort.
Here is the full text of the email, painlessly scanned using gimagereader.
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Dear Mr Tuke
Advertising for Proprietary Software
Thank you for your recent letter concerning the placement of Adobe Acrobat
Reader download links on our Council website. By adding these links, the
Council is simply providing access to a single free product to facilitate
proper viewing of the website without any expectation of commitment to any
further product or services. However, I can see why it might appear that we
are promoting Adobe’s product above others.
The Council generally uses Adobe Acrobat to create and optimise its PDFs and
therefore is confident that the Adobe Reader will render these adequately.
Output is actively tested using this and it would be unfeasible for the
Council to test all our output documents with numerous different products.
While I understand the freedom that completely free software provides, we do
not feel that the vast majority of site visitors are interested in access to
source code and the rights to adapt it. As such, the Adobe product provides a
number of other important features, such as:-
» Plug-ins for all major browsers.
» Compatibility with all major operating systems.
» Easy installation through OS and browser detection.
» Regular security updates.
» Accessibility features.
It would be time consuming for the Council to investigate numerous other
products for their suitability simply to recommend them as alternatives so we
utilise what we know provides an acceptable level of functionality for site
visitors.
Having said all that, the Council will act on your suggestion and add text to
clarify that other PDF readers are available. However, we will not be linking
to the PDFreaders.org site that you provided as we do not consider that it
offers the genuine range of options that most site visitors would be interested
in.
Yours sincerely
Richard Stiff
*Chief Executive*
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Sam Tuke
British Team Coordinator
Free Software Foundation Europe
IM : samtuke(a)jabber.fsfe.org
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