Hi there!
First of all, thank you for your interest in the PDFReaders-Campaign.
On Wednesday 13 October 2010 11:00:06 willie thepimp wrote:
Hi!
About your list of open PDF readers for mac: MuPDF isn't available for Mac OS X. Vindaloo hasn't been touched by it's author in the past 5 years, and the binarie that he offer on his website is only a ppc version.
We are aware of the situation on OSX and are working with Free Software developers to improve the availability of technically superior pdfreaders on the Mac-Platform.
And can you explain to me how "preview" (the PDF viewer on MacOS) doesn't allow me "to control my own privacy and data"?
The "preview" program -- as many other parts of the Mac-Desktop -- is proprietary software. That means it is not Free Software, as described here [1]. Concerning privacy this means, your "preview" program might gather statistics about which files you look at and send those statistics to a third party, e.g. when you install updates. I am not saying that it does, but it could do so without you knowing, because not you and noone else can look at the source code that the program was built from. Another example would be the software not showing certain documents or even deleting them, because the supplier does not agree with the content you want to display. There are numerous examples of beheviour like that [2].
Free Software has its Source Code in the open and grants you many freedems with it, so many interested parties can verify that the program only does what it's supposed to. Undesired behaviour will be found quickly and new versions released that don't show it.
I hope this example was helpful, if you have further questions feel free to ask.