Adobe Pushing For Flash and PDF In Open Government Initiative

angryrice tips news that Adobe seems to be campaigning for the inclusion of Flash and PDF in the Obama administration's efforts at increasing government transparency and openness. A post from the Sunlight Labs blog is critical of Adobe's undertaking, in part since PDF is often "non-parsable by software, unfindable by search engines, and unreliable if text is extracted." They also say government's priority should be to publish datasets and the APIs to interact with them, rather than choosing how they're displayed in fancy graphs and charts.

Comments

Re:Tell Adobe to open-license PDF

[TheRaven64]

It is an open standard. Implementing PDF is not the problem. Integrating a feature into MS Office that a third party provided and using their dominant market position in the office suite market to take market share in the PDF export market is the problem. HTML, as you say, is an open standard, but Microsoft was also prosecuted for including Internet Explorer - a program which (in some cases poorly) implemented open standards with Windows. Implementing HTML was not the problem here, bundling it with Windows and using the dominant market share was the problem. So, well done for providing an example which completely contradicts the point you were trying to make.