Acrobat-killer Submitted to Standards Body

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.'"

Comments

Re:Times are a changin'

[Anonymous Coward]

Assuming this standard is truly open... and compatible with the GPL (like... you don't have to sign agreements with Microsoft to implement it... which is their usual trick)... and has no submarine issues... then why would I care that it's from Microsoft.

So if Adolf Hitler offered you a nice lamp shade at pennies on the dollar, you'd buy it? After all, who cares if it was made out of the skin of Jews...

Re:Times are a changin'

[Nimey]

Well, yeah! How often do you have a dead guy try to sell you something?

Re:Times are a changin'

[GigsVT]

I don't know about you, but I'd much rather get a PDF than an MS Office document. The MS Office document has nearly zero chance of rendering completely correctly in Abiword or openoffice, where the PDF will nearly always work flawlessly.

That's the benefit of a completely open standard that anyone can implement, like PDF has.