To: jvncnet!oise.on.ca!USERMCQUEEN@dowv
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On Sun, 9 Oct 1994 jvncnet!oise.on.ca!USERMCQUEEN@dowv wrote:

> Please distribute the attached mail on a many listservs as possible. This is a
> MAJOR concern if ADOBE has their way. Once again, may folks will be left
> without true access to information, particularly on the NII.
 
> ICADD is working hard to block this, as well as the SGML Consortium. We hope
> to get your support.
 
> Please note that I will be at the Mosaic '94 conference next week and at the
> Internet '94 Conference in December, to ensure that we have an equal voice in
> accessibilty on the NII.

I am one of the biggest advocates of open systems.  Up until now, the
standards and protocols used on the internet have been established by the
internet advisory board.  Accepted standards are published as Requests for
Comment (RFCs) and must be proven to be implimentable through the use of
publicly available reference code.  The reference code can be either
public domain or "copyleft", but source code distribution is usually
unrestricted.

One example precident was when IBM wanted to establish the 3270
presentation protocol as an internet standard.  The standard was not
generally adopted by the internet community until a source code reference
copy of TN3270 was available on simtel-20 (the reference archive machine).
IBM (and many other vendors) offer enhanced 3270 implementations, but the
server can communicate with the freely available TN3270 implementation.

IF Adobe wants to follow those same rules, then PDF is not necessarily a
bad thing.  If Adobe wants to try to force the market to allow them to
establish a monopoly on multimedia formatted documents, they should
realize that there are about 50,000 engineers who are willing and able to
mobilize to create open standards implementations of SGML, MHEG, or MIME
that follow the "General Public License" (GPL) conventions. 

Sun tried to get a lock with RPC, OSF countered with DCE.  Sun countered
by putting RPC tools in "GPL".  IBM and DEC tried to get a lock on the
windows market with Motif, Sun put implementations of OpenLook in GPL.

More often, it's the customers who are willing to break the monopolies. 
When there are 3000 workstations at stake, it becomes worthwhile to invest
a few thousand dollars into a GPL software port.  Even at $50/copy,
corporate licensing of 3000 clients as capital expenses is much less
desirable than $50,000 in tax deductable labor expense.


> I understand that the US National Institute of Standards and Technology,
> supported by dollars from the Dept of Defense and Adobe has done a study
> suggesting that Adobe's proprietary PDF format be made a US Federal
> Information Processing Standard for electronic viewing.

Unless NIST is willing to completely waive the usual requirements, having
PDF adopted as a FIPS would imply a detailed specification in publicly
available form such that wide scale implementation under GPL would be
available.  It would probably be like the "Display PostScript" client on
X11R5 or "Ghostscript".  The funny thing is that Adobe came up with a new
version of postscript that violates backward compatibility requirements.
One can print "Ghostscript" on a postscript printer, but one cannot view
version 3 PostScript on a "Ghostscript" viewer.
 
> My feeling is that this would throw back the cause of accessible documents
> immeasurably. The idea that the page image -- one-time, non-reusable,
> non-adaptable, etc -- should be considered a valuable archival or display
> form is frightening.

The main advantage of such a format is that it has many of the propertys
of FAX.  Generally, it is very easy to modify a text document sent via
e-mail, but sending the same document over a FAX link makes altering the
original more complicated (but not impossible).

> I have heard all this just today, and very third hand, but I understand
> that Oct 17th is the last day for opposing viewpoints to be heard. I
> encourage those of you who are American, and taxpayers, to make your
> feelings known. The SGML Open Consortium will certainly do what it can
> in this area.

There are several groups trying to usurp the "Openness" of the internet. 
AT&T would like to force everything into end-to-end ATM over HDLC and
eliminate the TCP/IP interface (giving AT&T monopoly rights over interface
software to the internet).  IBM would like to try one last gasp of APPC as
the transport layer (Locking in OS/2, AIX, or MVS as "Must haves" for
corporate sites and PCs).

Once upon a time, someone tried to get Henry Ford to make a care that
would run on 20 gallons of water and 2 quarts of acetone.  They would
corner the fuel market together (unfortunately, the combination made the
engines break down).

People are always threatening us with elecric cars as the wave of the
future, but getting a recharge on interstate 80 has always been a bit of a
problem.

Part of the problem is, that people aren't buying the technology, they are
buying the service that the technology provides, and at the lowest
possible price.  Shareware products are viable threats, for example,
archives of PKZIP files are quite common.  GPL products are big threats. 
TCP/IP got it's foot in the door of most fortune 500 corporations when
they discovered that that was the only way to get a VAX, MVS, and MS-DOS
to talk to each other.  Everybody had their own protocol, but you had to
pay an arm and a leg to get that protocol on another vendor's machine.  On
the other hand, vendors of TCP/IP, often selling public domain software,
could simply port the software to anything that could support a C compiler.
Ironically, IBM created their TCP/IP for MVS product in PASCAL.

> Please keep the rest of this list informed too.

I would like to hear whether Adobe is willing to play by the "rules".

By the way, these rules are much like nettiquette rules.  No one says you
can't write a protocol that is ruthlessly proprietary and put your server
on the internet.  It is highly unlikely that you will be able to establish
much of a market before the competition comes up with something more open.

Other attemps at making the net proprietary included the movement to adopt
the OSI stack instead of TCP/IP.  Unfortunately, the $50,000/employee
training and documentation bill raised the cost to where the market could
no longer support it.

As a publisher, I would want as many paying customers as possible to have
access to my services. Customers created the Kerberos protected telnet,
secure NFS, and firewall routers.  Customers will create publication
capabilities.  The market will be created by the consumer.

	Rex Ballard


 



From rexb Fri Oct 21 17:31:35 1994