However, increasingly Governments are beginning to mandate or at least prefer that their own systems use open standards. Indeed, I am currently involved in the development of an open source policy for Malaysia which is also likely to recommend that open standards are adopted.
Unfortunately, at the moment, Adobe PDF cannot be endorsed by such initiatives as a standard to use. Perhaps once this trend grows, Adobe may open their standard properly, allowing not only community viewing of the standards, but community participation in developing it.
Imran William Smith
Mahesh T. Pai wrote:
What exactly is a standard? How do businessess profit from releasing document format specifications?
Just found this interesting quote about PDF at http://news.com.com/2030-1046_3-5190097.html?tag=st.lh
This is an interview with Bruce Chizen, Exec. VP, Adobe.
<quote> (Q) You've documented a number of your key architectures: PostScript, PDF, and--albeit somewhat reluctantly--the Type 1 font format. But these are not open-source initiatives, nor are they official standards controlled by standards bodies like the World Wide Web Consortium. Although Adobe documents these formats, it alone still controls them. Have you found a profitable middle ground between proprietary architectures and open source?
(A)With PostScript and PDF, we found that publishing the specifications--making them open, but not open standards, but not providing open source--is the right path for us. Once something becomes a standard driven by a standards body, it moves at a glacial pace. And innovation slows down significantly because you have to get everybody to agree and there's lots of compromise. If you make it totally open source, you don't get a return on investment.
We believe that by opening up the specification, we allow other people to take advantage of it. But because we still own the source, we get to innovate around that standard more quickly than anybody else. We have found that to be a great balance. PDF is the best example of that. We work on Acrobat, we work on PDF, we announce the product, we ship it, and we open up the specification.
We're already working on a whole series of applications, and we're already working on the next version of PDF. It seems to work. Customers are willing to pay a price--and even a premium--if they believe what they're buying is innovative and reliable.
</quote>