Hi fellows!
As some of you might know already, Georg Greve has been contacted by Adobe, because of pdfreaders.org In general Adobe "welcomes" pdfreaders.org, as it "confirms PDF's status as an open standard" - which is good news. But of course they think that there is still room for "improvement", see Georg's comments below.
This seems like a good opportunity to start talking with Adobe, in fact they have proposed a conference call, between different representives of Adobe and FSFE. This will be held soon and will involve at least Georg Greve (as President of FSFE) and myself from "our" side.
This means a couple of things: 1) don't contact Adobe on any matter by yourself. We will discuss all issues with them via phone; talking about issues now can only impact the talks negatively. 2) let us know what you expect from the conference call and what you think would be important to discuss 3) I will write an email to the developers of the pdfreaders and ask them what they think should be mentionened in the conference call. Can someone give the E-Mail-Addresses? It would be important for the E-Mail not get posted on public list...
No matter how the conference call goes, you can be sure: if Adobe thinks we are important, we most definitely are :D
Regards, Hannes
[greve@fsfeurope]:
Critical points are apparently:
a) they feel that ISO status of PDF is not yet sufficiently well represented
b) they fear that people will expect 100% compliance from Free Software readers, and are afraid that a "less than perfect" experience will be blamed by users on PDF, and thus fall back on Adobe.
On point a) I am sure working with them will be very useful.
On point b) I am thinking that this might actually work in our favour, and might bring Adobe closer to the Free Software world. Also we can use this to leverage more support for PDF implementations.
A statement that certain features are not available in some readers due to RAND conditions may seem like it shows that Adobe is the better solution, but it might also have the effect to identify and mark certain features as "not Open Standard" and ultimately increase the pressure on Adobe to move away from RAND.
One concrete thing that could be done is to bring the development teams of the Free Software PDF readers to the conference that the PDF/A center is apparently holding sometime later this year.
Maybe we can get the site to the state that Adobe feels the site is acceptable to them, get them to invite the Free Software PDF reader authors to Berlin, and do a joint press release on this. ;)