Re: Mark Daniel and/or Hein van den Huevel or anyone really

On Feb 10, 3:03 pm, b...@xxxxxxxxxxx (Bill Gunshannon) wrote:
In article <f068f$45ce2c57$cef8887a$10...@xxxxxxxxxxxx>,
JF Mezei <jfmezei.spam...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

Phillip Helbig---remove CLOTHES to reply wrote:
non-Microsoft software (at least as long as most people do use it). A
recent example is the attempt of Microsoft to establish a proprietary
format to replace PDF.

In what way is PDF not proprietary? It is the property of Adobe.
And is actually a heck of a lot less portable than the Postscript
that it replaced.

Adobe owns Postscript, too. The thing about Postscript and PDF is
that it's a published standard. Anyone can write software to
implement it. Similar for ODF, since it's an OASIS and IEEE
standard. Microsoft is trying to make their "Open" Office XML a
defined standard, but the glitch (and 19 nations filed contradictions
against it) is that there are several functions that only MS knows how
it works.

There are several Linux tools for reading PDF - Xpdf, Kpdf, The GIMP,
and more. There is at least a few versions of Xpdf ported to
OpenVMS. Chris Scheers(sp) has an XPDF viewer, too. There are tools
that are used to create PDF's, including one written entirely in PHP
called fpdf available at http://www.fpdf.org. And PHP runs on
OpenVMS.

You may bitch that PDF is a "propritary" standard, but at least it's
an openly published standard.

Gets worse. With VISTA, Microsoft wants to push a new proprietary image
format. It is bad enough Microsoft inflicted the world with .BMP.

Everything about MS software is proprietary. Just because people
figured out how to make EXE and COM files doesn't make them any
less proprietary. Personally, I hope they do. Everything they
do to drive away potential users and developers makes their hold
on the market more tenuous.

That's the problem - you have to figure it out. Even when they do
publish something (like in the EU anti-trust case, or the OOXML spec),
it's nearly impossible to figure out, much less implement.

Of course, no matter how proprietary they make it, the whole concept
is just too simple to keep everyone else from figuring it out.

Of course, OpenVMS is pretty proprietary, too. So was DECnet. But
VMS Internals and DECnet protocols are documented.

.

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