Hi Stian,
Your participation in the conference call is much appreciated and I can only assume you will do a great job convincing the Adobes ;-)
Well.. I hope.. Anyway Georg is hopefully going to the big part of talking, since he is the most experienced negotiator ;)
This means a couple of things:
- 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.
Would asking Leonard Rosenthol for comments on the Open Standard page draft be a problem in this regard?
Yes I think so. I have included Georg in CC, so he can comment on it. My impression was that part of the strategy could be /not/ letting them know exactly what we know and/or what we want before hand.
- let us know what you expect from the conference call and what you
think would be important to discuss
While I haven't found any website confirming that PDF is available through RAND agreements, which discriminate against Free Software through financial requirements, I assume that Georg and RMS are right when they claim such. That should be an important aspect to discuss.
I am not into things that deep so I can't comment on it. But if it is an issue, we should definitely mention it :)
Furthermore, Jose mentioned that there are patent holders other than Adobe that make claims to patent ownership of certain features in PDF. It would be nice if Adobe could make a pledge to support Free Software implementations of the PDF standard with their own patent portfolio (i.e. if any Free Software project is threatened with litigations for implementing the PDF standard, Adobe will help counter the threat with their own patents.)
I don't see how can Adobe can protect Free Software developers if they are sued for patent infringement other than paying their lawyers. But I am not an expert on patent law (maybe they could threaten to "counter-sue") and I don't think that we can get them to do something like that, after all they in reality do not want to lose market-share to other readers...
- 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...
I made a list of contact addresses for every project that was uploaded to team svn. I'll send you a copy privately.
Thanks. If you know that either of the addresses is a public mailing list, please mark it as such.
No matter how the conference call goes, you can be sure: if Adobe thinks we are important, we most definitely are :D
It's great to see pdfreaders.org having such an impact. I'd say we all have done a wonderful job on this ;-)
Yep :)
all the best, /Stian
Regards, Hannes