PDF being taken out of Microsoft Vista?

Good Morning Silicon Valley today reported that Microsoft is taking PDF capabilities out of Vista (the company's planned OS update), following a breakdown of negotiations between Microsoft and Adobe.

Why do any of us CAD persons care? Because PDF has always been an open standard and one of the leading success stories to the argument about making (any) file format open, including CAD formats. It also brings up the question of 3D PDF and how that little piece of technology will be handled. Randall Newton points out in AECnews that 'the DWF team at Autodesk must be clucking in glee' at this news, as DWF stands to gain from any negative impact in PDF.

Adobe is reportedly threatening to sue Microsoft because of the PDF functions. However, IPcentral's weblog archives shows a statement from Adobe at the recent discussions of the Open Document Format, "Adobe publishes the PDF standard in its entirety and makes it available for free, without restrictions, to anyone who cares to use it. No one needs permission from Adobe to build their own product with the PDF standard."

hmmm. Weird. And worrying. As this will once again allow CAD companies to continue to believe that CAD formats should remain closed.

And before you write me off as an ODA brainwashee - I wouldn't represent Open Design Alliance if I didn't believe that users should have access to their design data, all the time, and without restriction.

We will be watching where the Microsoft/Adobe fight goes, mostly in context of the 3D and CAD industry.

Comments

[Gerald Pierce]

I think that the problem is not so much one of open use as what Microsoft will DO with the the technology. Remember what happened with JAVA? Suddenly there was a Microsoft version of java which did NOT "play well with others".

So when I loaded the latest MS betas that included the pdf capabilities, guess what, my Adobe Acrobat 7 Pro was broken.
To be fair, it is beta software and one can expect these kinds of problems. When I did a remove and re-install of Acrobat things began working again so now all is fine.

As a back check, I did a temporary install of the beta software on two other computers in my office (one a laptop and one an older system) and encountered the same problem. When I removed the MS beta's, things worked fine again.

I don't have a clue as to the cause of the problem and now it looks like we will never find out. But Adobe does have the resources and the need to check such problems out in depth and I can't help but wonder if what they found might be the source of the strong protest.