Re: Certification for GNOME apps

[Jonathan Blandford <jrb redhat com>]

"Ciaran O'Riordan" <ciaran fsfe org> writes:

> > > Federico Mena Quintero <federico ximian com> writes:
> > > > [...]"certification levels" for GNOME
> > > > [...]ISVs are starting to develop GNOME-ish apps (c.f. Adobe Acrobat
> > > > Reader).
> 
> GNOME hackers are working on free software replacements for Acrobat and many
> other pieces of proprietary software.  
> 
> Telling Adobe how to improve Acrobat makes the job of the Gpdf and Evince
> developers more difficult.  (plus other GNOME pdf viewer projects.)

As one of the main evince[1] developers, I feel like I have to reply to
this comment.  I don't feel at all that spending time helping Acrobat
improve their product is detrimental to evince at all.  In fact, when
Acrobat came out, I was really disappointed at how poor an integration
job they'd done and felt that we really needed to work with them to
improve it.

There are a couple reasons I don't feel threatened by Acroread

 * Evince is free software.  I personally don't feel that the existence
   of non-free software keeps free software from developing.  The
   benefits of it are too great.

 * Poppler isn't able to render every single PDF out there (though we
   are getting better!)  Having Acroread as a fallback means that users
   of Free systems will be able to get work done.

 * The Evince team is writing a totally different application than
   Acroread.  Acroread is a giant, fully-featured pdf viewer that
   supports every obscure feature that the PDF spec covers.  We aim to
   provide a reader that's optimized for reading documents, and covers
   the sensible bulk of PDFs.  Additionally, we are planning on being
   the default 'print preview' feature for GNOME, which is a role
   totally unsuited for Acroread.

 * I know that our efforts stand on their own, and that in time, users
   who know nothing of licensing will pick Evince over Acroread.

 * For all we know, Acroread might be Free software someday.  I'd love
   if it was a great product that they opened up instead of a poor one.

Thanks,
-Jonathan

[1] Which has replaced gpdf