RMS, Free software and the Ubuntu CDs

[Karl Goetz]

Alexander Skwar wrote:
> 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.

Sounds like embedded fonts (or a bug)
> 
>> 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?
> 
kgoetz at Evangelion:~$ apt-cache policy evince
evince:
   Installed: 0.5.2-0ubuntu3
   Candidate: 0.5.2-0ubuntu3
   Version table:
  *** 0.5.2-0ubuntu3 0
         100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
      0.5.2-0ubuntu2 0
         500 http://mirror.internode.on.net edgy/main Packages
kgoetz at Evangelion:~$

(internode is my ISP)
kk

>> 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


-- 
Karl Goetz
The buck stops there -> $
Australian Ubuntu users team - http://wiki.ubuntu.com/AustralianTeam