RMS, Free software and the Ubuntu CDs

[Alexander Skwar]

Alan McKinnon wrote:
> On Sun, 2006-07-02 at 11:09 +0200, Alexander Skwar wrote:
>> > I do get your meaning - compare evince to acroread for a good
>> example.
>> 
>> You mean, for an example where the commercial program is very much
>> crappy or doesn't add anything in comparison to the FLOSS solution?
>> So you wanted to give an example which contradicts what Michael
>> wrote?
> 
> No, I mean more like missing functionality in evince.

Aha. As far as I'm concerned, Acroread doesn't add any features. At
least I don't know of any.

> Like on last
> Monday when the boss comes by and would like to see my new shiny RHCE
> cert before I deliver my first RH course and evince says that 
> " lan Mc innon" is a " ed  at  ertified  ngineer".

Hm. Never seen something like that.

> And the watermark is
> missing. So's the RH dude's signature. And the logo. And it won't rotate
> the pdf either.

evince *does* have a rotate feature. At least 0.5.3 has. I don't
care that much about older releases.

> Things like that. I find acroread to have tons more
> functionality than evince,

Like? Evince can copy text from the PDF to clipboard. Just like
Acroread. That's actually the most THE most important feature
for me.

> so your comment "doesn't add anything"
> doesn't really hold up.

Okay. It doesn't add anything that I use. It doesn't add any features
that I know about.

> On the plus side, the very latest evince update fixed all that,

"very latest" = 0.5.3? If so, then that's why I didn't understand
what you wrote and wrote "doesn't add anything", as 0.5.3 is the
version I know from Gentoo. Does Dapper have an older version?

> evince
> loads way faster than acroread,

*WAY*. Sometimes it takes about 1 minute to fire up acroread on
my machine - and I don't have a slow machine. Evince is there in
a matter of seconds.

> The point is that FLOSS-ware gets released early, released often and
> improvements are incremental. By definition, FLOSS pdf solutions will
> always be behind Adobe's latest and greatest. I'm no commercial fan-boy,
> but it doesn't take a genius to see that product A is more mature and
> has more real features than product B.

Well. What features *ARE* missing in the FLOSS PDF solution?
Hm - I know one: DRM junk. Well, that'll be close to the only
feature, I guess, which will never be present in FLOSS PDF
stuff.

Alexander Skwar
-- 
Do more than anyone expects, and pretty soon everyone will expect more.