RMS, Free software and the Ubuntu CDs

[Alan McKinnon]

On Sun, 2006-07-02 at 13:43 +0200, Alexander Skwar wrote:
> Alan McKinnon 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.

I'm in the embarrassing position of not being able to back myself up :-)
My Ubuntu notebook got updated to 0.5.2 and has functionality I don't
recall being there before. My gentoo box is doing a huge emerge
including an update to xorg 7 from 6.8 so it'll be many hours before X
will start to see what evince does there.

> 
> > 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.

Now that I think of it, it could be an artifact of my video hardware and
not the software at all.

> > 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?

0.5.2 on this end

> > 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.

Well this sub-thread started when Michael asserted that 80% of
beta-stuff on Sourceforge was less feature-ful than commercial
equivalents, so the specific case of evince proves nothing other than
evince is improving all the time. There is an apparancy that quality is
higher with commercial but I'd say that is because failed FLOSS projects
are open to view by all whereas failed commercial goes to /dev/null/ and
only the dev team ever saw them. So it's just an apparency not a
reality. Commercial quality is higher on average on things marked "beta"
but that's probably because of different POVs on what constitutes a beta

alan