RMS, Free software and the Ubuntu CDs

[Alan McKinnon]

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. 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". And the watermark is
missing. So's the RH dude's signature. And the logo. And it won't rotate
the pdf either. Things like that. I find acroread to have tons more
functionality than evince, so your comment "doesn't add anything"
doesn't really hold up.

On the plus side, the very latest evince update fixed all that, evince
loads way faster than acroread, and it has a presentable gui. Acroread
looks like a crock of excrement, only marginally better than xpdf.

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.

alan