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Acrobat-killer Submitted to Standards Body

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the going-legit dept.

Flying Wallenda writes "Did Adobe make a tactical blunder when it complained to the European Union about Microsoft including support for its XML Paper Specification (XPS) in Windows Vista and Office 2007? Now that Microsoft has decided to submit its 'PDF killer' to a standards-setting organization, Adobe may be regretting its decision. 'Microsoft is looking again at its license in order to make it compatible with open source licenses, which means that the "covenant not to sue" will likely be extended to cover any intellectual property dispute stemming from the simple use or incorporation of XPS. The end result is that using XPS may be considerably more attractive for developers now that the EU has apparently expressed concerns over the license.'"

3 of 326 comments (clear)

  1. Word Dilution by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Pretty soon the word 'killer' will have lost its original meaning. In fact, it will be a compliment to be called a 'killer' because it means you were a solution for a problem that already had a widely popular solution.

    Yet you overcame that and somehow became the new solution until you yourself were killed. And your functionality was conveyed specifically by saying '<competing solution> killer.' They couldn't even take the time to mention what it was you did.

    Slashdot uses this way too much.


    Killer.

  2. I love adobe by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Forcing a reboot to update a file viewer is pure quality and genius.

    I hope they die real soon.

  3. PDF is too complicated by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It's unreasonably hard to generate quality PDF programmatically.
    Either you have resort to using the virtual printer driver supplied with Acrobat, or you have to typeset your document to PostScript format using TeX or whatever.
    And if you use the virtual printer driver, forget about interactive features and full-text searching.
    Editing PDFs is a nightmare - PostScript allows way too much flexibility for a 'portable' format.

    I don't know much about XPS, but organizing the document as a set of zipped XML files seems to be a step in the right direction.