Adobe Threatens Microsoft With Suit 362
lseltzer writes "Adobe has threatened an antitrust suit against Microsoft, over PDF writing in Office 2007. Adobe wants Microsoft to separate the feature and charge extra for it. Microsoft has agreed to remove PDF writing, but won't charge extra." From the eWeek article: "In February, Adobe Chief Executive Bruce Chizen told Reuters he considered Microsoft to be the company's biggest concern. 'The competitor I worry about most is Microsoft,' Chizen said at the time. Adobe's PDF technology lets producers create and distribute documents digitally that retain designs, pictures and formatting. "
Summary incorrect. (Score:5, Insightful)
I think its FUD on MS's part: From Adobe's PDF Reference [adobe.com] page: Unless MS extends PDF in a manner imcompatable with adobe's PDF. (but that would never happen [slashdot.org])
Re:Summary incorrect. (Score:5, Insightful)
I tend to agree, unless MS is mis-stating its case to garner early sympathy. Adobe Opened the PDF spec, unless they specifically reserved some portion as "trade secret" or the license restricted implementation of certain features. Adobe's been making money on their Portable Document Format for a decade, and if the product is doomed to slide into the non-profitable abyss, then they will need to adjust. Perhaps they could react by extending Acrobat into a full featured Word processor?
Software Dictatorship (Score:4, Interesting)
It is because techies have such poor social skills. They talk of libertarian ideals but in reality are mostly doormats who feel safer with a monolithic dictator. Nerds sadly trade proper ownership for the false substitute of being controlled by surrogate big daddy.
Adobe software is fighting a losing battle in a totalitarian industry where the tech worker attitude enables tyranny.
What's the Correct One? (Score:3, Insightful)
There's no reasonable reading of the story that doesn't include an Adobe threat of legal action. And do you really find it hard to believe that another software company would threaten Microsoft with an antirust suit?
Re:What's the Correct One? (Score:4, Interesting)
Why do you say that? All I could see in the article was: Representatives of Microsoft and Adobe were not immediately reachable for comment. - that's not refusing to comment.
Now, I suspect the reason Microsoft & Adobe have been negotiating, is over rights to use Adobes proprietary DRM extensions (the ones that are not implemeneted by openoffice, Apple's print to PDF feature, etc).
When negotiations broke down (who knows what reason for, perhaps Adobe was trying to screw MS or vice versa), MS was left without being able to fully support PDF.
There's no reasonable reading of the story that doesn't include an Adobe threat of legal action.
You haven't been following Microsoft stories for long have you?
Re:What's the Correct One? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:What's the Correct One? (Score:5, Informative)
Microsoft are developing a competitor to PDF, codenamed 'Metro', that allows all the same functions as PDF as well as being integrated with the Vista printing system (much like Mac OS X's 'Print as PDF'). They also demonstrated it (I think at WinHEC 2005) printing direct to 'Metro-enabled' printers with a noticeable quality boost. They later renamed the format 'XPS' [microsoft.com] and it is present in the current Office 2007 builds.
I think this is typical style Microsoft FUD to make it look like Adobe wants them to drop PDF, when actually, it's MS that wants rid of PDF in order to promote its XPS format. Despite PDF's strong foothold, integration of XPS within the widest used operating system and widest used office suite could change things. I reckon this is MS saying "sorry, not our fault you have to use our format!".
Re:What's the Correct One? (Score:3, Informative)
[OfficeLogoMenu] > 'Save As...(arrow next to it)' > 'PDF or XPS'. Guess what? XPS is Metro.
Whoever modded you informative needs a +1 cluebat to the head.
Re:XPS is a better format than PDF for printing (Score:3, Informative)
Nonsense. Google for linearized PDF (its in an appendix of the PDF spec).
Re:XPS is a better format than PDF for printing (Score:3, Informative)
I've never heard of a printer that printed PDF directly, but there are very many that can interpret Postscript.
In the world of this industry the best achievers aspire to make the page rendering as multi-threaded as possible.
I doubt anyone cares about that right now. Do you have any reference backing this up at all? Most low end printers even render a single page multiple times because they lack the bu
Re:Summary incorrect. (Score:2)
Anti-trust Lawsuits are a subset of Lawsuits. Just because there are legal issues to be worked out (patents, trademarks, lecensing) does not imply that a breakdown in negotiations will result in an "Anti-trust" lawsuit.
Even pointed out on a techie website as FUD, MS FUD works. Are we all doomed?
Re:Summary incorrect. (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, I'm sure this person's theory is more accurate than MS saying they are pulling XPS out of Office. Sure, this post you reference has to be more CORRECT than MS's official press statements about removing XPS from Office 2007.
Adobe was trying to get $$ from the great MS and threatening them with going to the EU if Microsoft didn't pony up royalties, and people here are rushing to defend
Re:Summary incorrect. (Score:3, Insightful)
XPS is basically what the Print Engine, or Vector compose in Vista uses to pass data around, although it can be dropped into a file format. Even MS admits that XPS is not in the same category as PDF, nor includes the features of PDF.
However, for whatever reason, Adobe's bargain
So (Score:3, Interesting)
Or ps2pdf?
Whats the point of opening the spec for PDF, if you don't want other people's applications to be able to write them?
Re:So (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:So (Score:3, Insightful)
EPS? No. PDF? Usually not. SVG? No on that too.
So why isn't Adobe expected to sue Apple? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:So why isn't Adobe expected to sue Apple? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:So why isn't Adobe expected to sue Apple? (Score:2)
just my wild-ass guess.
Yet another misleading summary. (Score:5, Informative)
From TFA (emphasis mine): Adobe hasn't 'threatened' anything. Nowhere in the story is the word 'threat' used.
Re:Yet another misleading summary. (Score:2)
Re:Yet another misleading summary. (Score:3, Insightful)
Playing Devil's Advocate here (Score:5, Informative)
What do Adobe think of that?
Re:Playing Devil's Advocate here (Score:3, Interesting)
You don't sue people who don't have money. Why go after some shlub?
Note: The above statement does not apply to creatures and other entitites that have eruptedd out of the orifices of the devil such as the RIAA and the MPAA.
Re:Playing Devil's Advocate here (Score:2, Interesting)
openoffice has pdf export - no money - no lawsuit.
we have programmale format objects for xml in several
programming languages which can make pdf's with xml/xslt
but again - no money - no lawsuit.
kde can print into pdf (i think it may use ps2pdf internally)
but no money here neither so no lawsuit.
this is the very same reason why bittorrent's author
is not in the court of law yet neither. he doesn't make
a penny from the file sharing going on here, so he
won't be sued. but the site runners that make m
Re:Playing Devil's Advocate here (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Playing Devil's Advocate here (Score:2)
They probably think "That's not going to be installed automatically on 90% of business computers; who cares?" Office, of course, will be. But while that is a dramatic and real difference, I don't think there's anything they can or should be able to do about it.
Personally, if it means that people stop using Word as the format of choice for passing aroun
Re:Playing Devil's Advocate here (Score:3, Insightful)
OTOH, Microsoft integrating such functionality into Office would effectively kill off a significant market for Adobe Acrobat pretty quickly. A lot of people either don't know of
Re:Playing Devil's Advocate here (Score:2)
What about if someone set up a box to listen on port 9100, like it was a JetDirect-compatible printer, so you "print" documents to it; and convert the received documents to PDF and serve them out via an Apache server, so you can later download PDFs of what you "printed" from a web-based interface ?
Re:Playing Devil's Advocate here (Score:2)
Then I would address them as "Mr. Goldberg".
Try this Windows ghostscript wrapper [primopdf.com]. It installs a printer, pops up a dialog box when you print to it which prompts for a filename, and then saves the PDF. There are
Re:Playing Devil's Advocate here (Score:2)
I can certainly see why Adobe would be scared of a PDF export funciton in Office. Many, many people would take advantage of it. As it stands now, most office workers do not even know that this capability is available in OpenOffice.org. Also, I suspect that many compan
Re:Playing Devil's Advocate here (Score:2)
There's no need to install OpenOffice.org. Install:
http://www.cutepdf.com/download/converter.exe [cutepdf.com]
http://www.cutepdf.com/download/CuteWriter.exe [cutepdf.com]
That will give you a PDF printer device, to which you can print from ANY application. It will prompt you for a filename, and generate the PDF.
Re:Playing Devil's Advocate here (Score:2)
I'm not sure what the penetration of those things is like, but in my office it's really high, like up around 80 or 90 percent. Their most frequent use is making softcopy "prints" of web pages to send to people, to avoid the formatting getting too mangled (which would happen if you sent it as
Re:Playing Devil's Advocate here (Score:3, Informative)
Agreed. OO.o version 2 can not only generate PDFs, but also generate the table of contents that you sometimes see on the left hand side with PDFs - something which a printer-driver type PDF creator cannot do because by the time it sees the document it knows nothing about its structure.
It's the extra features like this whi
Re:Playing Devil's Advocate here (Score:2)
It is not a patent lawsuit, but an Anti-Trust lawsuit. That to me implies that there is no intellectual property rights that Adobe could use to try and bully Microsoft with.
If Anti-Trust is the only tool Adobe has, then none of the other solutions would be at risk.
Re:Playing Devil's Advocate here (Score:3, Interesting)
One is that some subset of distiller is in Microsoft Word under an agreement with Adobe. If you install Adobe Acrobat (not the reader, the full version), it adds a subset of distiller to Word.
There is a LOT of business out there that converts Word documents to PDF. Adobe makes a lot of money from it, and Microsoft is speculating that when they add PDF capabilities to Word for no extra charge, that this market will be quashed and Adobe will lose money.
Kinda like when Microsoft
Re:Playing Devil's Advocate here (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Playing Devil's Advocate here (Score:2)
Of course, that's why the suit is being threatened in the EU.
Re:Playing Devil's Advocate here (Score:3, Informative)
From the article on the web-page:
"Adobe gives copyright permission to anyone to:
- Prepare files in which the file content conforms to the Portable Document Format.
- Write drivers and applications that produce output represented in the Portable Document Format.
- Write software that accepts input in the form of the Portable Document Format and displays the results,
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Playing Devil's Advocate here (Score:2)
It's not like MS doesn't have a long history of producing brain-damaged products. He
Re:Playing Devil's Advocate here (Score:2)
Re:Playing Devil's Advocate here (Score:2)
infact you can only install it if you have Office XP or later as it is only provided on the CD.
i find that it makes better files that are smaller and the built in OCR is pretty nice and when being printed to it handels alot of the funky objects people put in their documents alot better (constistly better) than Adobe Distiller
i wouldn't mind using them more offte
What's sauce for Apple isn't sauce for Microsoft? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:What's sauce for Apple isn't sauce for Microsof (Score:2)
Source:apple [apple.com]
So I'm guessing that apple took care of the licensing issues far in advance.
--ST
Re:What's sauce for Apple isn't sauce for Microsof (Score:4, Informative)
So I'm guessing that apple took care of the licensing issues far in advance.
Licensing issues? PDF is an approved open standard with perpetual free licensing and patent protection from Adobe. Why would Apple have to take care of anything any more than all the free software projects that re-implemented it?
Re:What's sauce for Apple isn't sauce for Microsof (Score:5, Informative)
Regards,
Steve
Re:What's sauce for Apple isn't sauce for Microsof (Score:5, Insightful)
How is it that the MS fanbois leap to defend MS & Bash Apple without reading the article?
Adobe's threatened nothing. Microsoft is spreading FUD.
(and Apple uses PDF for a helluva lot more then what you've mentioned)
Re:What's sauce for Apple isn't sauce for Microsof (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:What's sauce for Apple isn't sauce for Microsof (Score:2)
I used the PDF export in Office 2007 Beta 2 (Score:4, Interesting)
Its integrated, its almost as quick as saving the file, and most of all, it doesn't require 300megs of crappy Adobe junk to be installed which hogs your system, installs a printer driver, and adds its toolbars to every fucking application.
I hope microsoft does NOT remove PDF export functionality, because the alternative (adobe acrobat) is annoying and bloated. Sure, it might have OCR and some other niceties, but it should stick to that, instead of trying to take over every document publishing app on my PC.
Re:I used the PDF export in Office 2007 Beta 2 (Score:2)
There is an easier way than Adobe Distiller (Score:5, Informative)
There is an easier way. See PDFCreator. [sourceforge.net] It's a simple printer driver, doesn't take up but a meg or two, installs no toolbars or nag crap. It just makes PDF files.
It's simple, clean, accurate and elegant, IMHO.
Isn't PDF an open standard ? (Score:2, Redundant)
Re:Isn't PDF an open standard ? (Score:2)
Well, if you RTFA... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Well, if you RTFA... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Well, if you RTFA... (Score:3, Interesting)
Why not? Since when does having a monopoly mean that you can't give things away free?
MS has a monopoly on their OS. Thus, they are not under normal market pressure for the price of the OS. They can, theoretically, raise the price $10 with little or no effect upon sales, to whatever the maximum amount of income will be, regardless of any competition. Why does this matter? It matters because nothing is truly free. It costs money to purify, bottle and ship water. Thus by "giving it away for free" what they
Well.... (Score:3, Funny)
What worries me about this is that OOo has PDF export that gave them a nice "feature" that MS-Office didn't have. Now Adobe is going after MS, I have to wonder if OOo gets popular enough they will demand that it be removed too.
Maybe it's just my cynical anti-big-corporation views, but I don't trust Adobe enough to not use their big stick against OOo.
They can't. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Well.... (Score:2)
Even if they could, I don't think they would. I think Adobe would rather see their PDF format used as much as possible (such as including it in OpenOffice) than suing and losing a bit of market share.
gimme a break (Score:4, Informative)
for reading i use foxit: http://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/rd_intro.php [foxitsoftware.com]
for saving i make an html page and run it through some pdf generator online (i have to do that maybe twice a year for clients who will only take pdf invoices)
not to mention, isn't "Save As PDF..." built into like every other apple application, and can't pdfs be opened with apple's Preview?
Re:gimme a break (Score:2)
Re: You're probably not their target market then (Score:2)
Most of the time, a Windows user can simply install a free package like "CutePDF Writer" which adds a printer device that makes PDFs out of anything you can send to a printer. I use it at work all the time to do things like conversion of AutoCAD drawings to PDF files.
But Adobe's Acrobat Pro lets you build PDF forms that allow u
WTF? (Score:2)
which is the reason why I'm going to make sure NOT to compete by, oh I don't know, actually having a superior platform; rather, I will sue and hope for the best.
Jeez how detestable... They better sue Openoffice.org and every other piece of software out there that exports to PDF before the whole industry sees through their hypocrisy. Besides... Adobe has the best PDF suite out there. Anybody who works with PDF is using it and not switching to Offi
Re:WTF? (Score:2)
Re:WTF? (Score:2)
Suck it Adobe (Score:2)
Maybe they'll pull an Apple (Score:2, Flamebait)
On a slightly related note, I still think its really odd that the bundled Preview app in OS X just completely smokes Acrobat Reader, in terms of display speed.
WTF? (Score:2)
Bill
Re:WTF? (Score:2)
Which would be exactly like bundling but with 150kb of network traffic.
I don't understand why people still are using PDF (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I don't understand why people still are using P (Score:2)
Time to reconsider Linux PDF (Score:2)
Cairo with the PDF writing backend was set to ship with the next crop of distributions as the bugs have been pretty comprehensively fixed over the last few months.
It would be a shame if PDF writing support ends up tainting Linux distributions and slowing their adoption in large organisations. It seems that making at least a branch of Cairo without the PDF writing backend would be a good move for now.
The
Isn't PDF format in the public domain ? (Score:2)
What PDF writer? (Score:2)
Where is this alleged PDF writer in MSFT apps? I've got Office 2003 Enterprise Edition, and I had to go out and find and install a 3rd party PDF writer.
Re:What PDF writer? (Score:3, Informative)
In other news.. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:In other news.. (Score:5, Insightful)
And for you folks saying PDFs are a scourge of the Internet I agree. My pet peeve is links that open PDFs without warning, especially when they're incorporated into some kind of fancy button that doesn't even reveal the destination in the status bar on the bottome of the browser.
However, PDF is the de facto standard for distributing print-ready documents, and in that role, it's a Good Thing.
Re:In other news.. (Score:3, Informative)
Not in this case. Adobe is purportedly talking antitrust. Under antitrust laws, actions that are perfectly legal for normal people and companies are nontheless forbidden to monopolies. For example, Linux distros and Apple can bundle any media players they like with their OSes in Europe, but Microsoft was slap
Clearly FUD (Score:3, Interesting)
The proof? Adobe is shipping a product (MacroMedia's Cold Fusion Server) with my F/OSS library iText [lowagie.com] to produce PDF from Cold Fusion pages. I never heard anybody at Adobe complain because I wrote a free PDF engine.
As a PDF specialist I know that the big money isn't in the conversion from Word to PDF. PDF is a lot more than text documents. The Acrobat product family is used for completely different reasons than a product like MS Word or a free library like iText.
This was expected. (Score:5, Insightful)
The best thing Adobe can do is publically state that it would like MS Office to include an unadultered version of PDF output ability.
Adobe can't have its cake and eat it too (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Adobe can't have its cake and eat it too (Score:3, Informative)
It's an interesting situation, this one. Although maybe it's just because, for once, the other side is another company who is often seen as overcharging for their software.
But, like other situations, here we have MS wanting to include something that would pretty much make their stranglehold on office software even tighter. And would definitely jeopardise the competition. In this case, Adobe. And in most of those situations I find myself loudly wishing that Miscrosoft would FOAD.
Yet, this time, I find mys
Even if it's true that Adobe wants to sue.. (Score:5, Funny)
Oh, to be a fly in that Adobe/Microsoft boardroom....
We also thought you might want to take advantage of the new encryption capabilities for protecting your customers' valuable data with the upcoming Vista Next Generation Secure Computing Base.
Adobe sues Slashdot for Lying Headlines (Score:3, Informative)
On another topic, unfortunately its probably not possible to sue publications, like the linked one, that routinely print the following phrase (as they do in the linked story): "were not immediately reachable for comment" (emphasis, mine).
Every story that prints that should be forced to replace it with: "You should know, by the way, that I am an ass sucking reporter who couldn't manage to communicate to principle sources for my story, though I may have put in minimal effort to do so (and I reserve the right to define minimal), and I work for an ass sucking publication who's editors don't give a sucked rat's ass, so we're publishing this possibly substanceless collection of blurbs but feel the need to add this line so it sounds like the principle subjects of the story suck even more ass than we do; except worded this way it's clear we suck even more ass than they do, oops (did I use a semicolon? sorry)." Or, just leave the useless and idiotic line out.
This isn't licensing, it's antitrust. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:This isn't licensing, it's antitrust. (Score:2)
MS needs to compete as well, and if its competitors (openoffice et al) contain the ability that they are including, I dont see how it can be considered an extension of their
Re:This isn't licensing, it's antitrust. (Score:2)
(IANAL, and the bits of law I've formally studied have no
Re:This isn't licensing, it's antitrust. (Score:2)
Re:This isn't licensing, it's antitrust. (Score:2)
Yes, but that's not their legal basis to have an antitrust argument; their basis for having a legal leg to stand on is that a pre-existing monopoly is being leveraged into a different market area. Can that argument be made with regard to PDF support? Yes, but badly: PDF creation tools have historically been in different market space than office suites. Could it be made with regard to ODF support
Re:This isn't licensing, it's antitrust. (Score:2)
Re:This isn't licensing, it's antitrust. (Score:2)
If the reasoning you put forward proves successful in a court of law, it means MS cannot really add any feature to their Office platform unless either it has been implemented elsewhere in a direct competitor in the exact same market, or it is a totally new featur
Re:This isn't licensing, it's antitrust. (Score:2)
OpenOffice is a competitor to MS Office, and includes PDF-creation features. I do not see how MS is leveraging their monopoly into a different product space by implementing features that their direct competitors in that same product space already implement.
In other words, OO did it first, so now PDF creation is a feature of office suites; it seems only fair for MS (despite being a monopoly) to be allowed to do likewise.
Re:This isn't licensing, it's antitrust. (Score:2)
Re:This isn't licensing, it's antitrust. (Score:2)
This is silly
Re:When you whine... (Score:2)
I, too, didn't RTFA, but I'm quite aware that Adobe isn't threatening with a suit at all -- Microsoft is spreading FUD that they speculate that Adobe will.
Re:When you whine... (Score:5, Informative)
You are wrong in this instance. They've opened the format for anyone to implemement since it's good for them gaining market share and ubiquity.
Now that Microsoft wants to add PDF support like thousands other 3-rd party PDF writer products out there (including OpenOffice), they're spreading FUD about adobe, rather then just quietly implementing PDF support.
PDF is an open format for anyone to implement.
Re:PDFs are the scurge of the Internet (Score:2)
What's really annoying is that there is absolutely no point to implement the concept of a "page" on the screen.
There should be a continuous flow like a HTML document. And even what they SAY is a continuous flow option really is not - you still see the spacing between pages.
Because the navigation is based on "pages", which do not map very well to pages on the screen (at least
Re:OOo (Score:2)