Re: [pdf-devel] Expanation, please?

[Gustavo Martin Domato]

Jose:

On Tue, 2011-10-11 at 01:21 +0200, Jose E. Marchesi wrote: 
> > I reckon the FSF communicate may be confusing.  It is obvious that the
>     > project is not "done" at all and that not all the issues motivating it
>     > have been solved.  
>     
>     What was solved? What wasn't?
> 
> As I said, the licensing of both ghostscript and the xpdf codebase is
> now much better than in 2007: they are both distributed under GPLv3 (in
> the case of xpdf it is under a dual license supporting both v2 and v3 in
> its version 3.03).  The GNU PDF software is GPLv3+, meaning version 3 or
> any later version as published by the FSF.  That is the preferred
> licensing schema for GNU packages, and is very important for us.  So the
> licensing problem was fixed, but only partially.
> 
> The support for interactive features (namely forms and annotations) is
> much better now in free software engines.  A big concern was that the
> citizens of some countries were being forced to use proprietary software
> in order to interact with their governments (like in taxes declarations)
> or in some other way.  The situation is not that bad now thanks to the
> good work of the libpoppler hackers.
> 
> On the architectural side the library we are writing mimics in a big
> extent the architecture of the Acrobat SDK (unlike xpdf/poppler and
> ghostscript) by providing a layered set of well documented APIs.  Those
> layers will provide access to the PDF documents in several levels for
> both reading and writing.  The purpose of the library is to not just to
> serve as a rendering engine for PDF viewers, but to provide the
> foundations to write many different applications manipulating PDF
> documents.
> 
> We are also working in verifiable support for the several standards
> (PDF/A, PDF/X, etc).  This will allow to certify the library in order to
> support free software applications in some areas such as long-term
> preservation of documents.
> 
> Another key aspect of GNU PDF which is missing from the existing free
> implementations is extensibility: we want the library to be extensible
> to allow people to add the functionality they need.  We wanted to add
> support for plugins written both in C and in some interpreted language.
> The development of a PDF-specific extensible graphical application in
> the same spirit than Acrobat is also included in our plan.
> 

That's much clearer. Maybe I can suggest uploading it to the project's
web page? The goals statement there is rather vague.

> This is not an exhaustive list but it exemplifies why, IMO, we are not
> done yet.
>     
>     So, we're still on the go but don't know clearly what for. How can
>     we be sure we're not duplicating efforts?
> 
> There will always be some degree of duplication among the PDF engines,
> but they are different and they have different goals.  You may think
> that some other project provides a better foundation where to implement
> the features above... well, hacking time is an extremely valuable
> resource and each hacker must decide where her time is best invested :)
> 

I understand. But some sort of coordination is required on behalf of the
FSF. I'm specially concerned about the fact that GNU is growing fast and
it's management abilities aren't matching speed. That usually means
problems are ahead.


Regards,
Gustavo