FSFE Launches Free PDF Readers Campaign

Posted by kdawson on Monday February 2, 2009 @02:37PM from the prety-darn-fine dept.

FSFE Fellow writes "The Fellowship of the Free Software Foundation Europe is proud to announce its latest initiative: pdfreaders.org, a site providing information about PDF with links to Free Software PDF readers for all major operating systems. FSFE president Georg Greve says: 'Interoperability, competition and choice are primary benefits of Open Standards that translate into vendor-independence and better value for money for customers. Although many versions of PDF offer all these benefits for formatted text and documents, files in PDF formats typically come with information that users need to use a specific product. pdfreaders.org provides an alternative to highlight the strengths of PDF as an Open Standard.'"

2 of 198 comments (clear)

Re:What? No Foxit? by BikeHelmet · 2009-02-02 15:27 · Score: 3, Funny

Linux and OSX seem to have decent free PDF readers. It's only Windows that is lacking.
But yes, it does have a nice interface and presentation.
What?! by CobaltBlueDW · 2009-02-02 19:05 · Score: 2, Funny

Did I miss something? Isn't PDF still proprietary?
How are Open Source applications interfacing with a proprietary file format and not infringing on the copyrights?
The answer I thought was that they are just readers, so Adobe has aloud decoding, but not encoding. Although, OpenOffice can encode PDFs, so now I'm back to confused. :/
Also, why use a proprietary format like PDF in the first place? Laziness?