PDF becomes an open standard

This doesn't make Acrobat open source. Proprietary standards are offered to standards bodies all the time. 

Microsoft's efforts to make its file formats standards have led to enormous controversy, because they're proprietary and, frankly, a lot of people don't trust Microsoft to play nice. Eventually, Microsoft agreed to support the ODF format of Open Office as a standard as well. But there is no real alternative to PDF, is there?

Adobe, aware of this history, is hosting a blogger chat tonight. (Space is limited so hit the link now if you're interested.) It's at 8 PM Eastern time, 5 PM on the West Coast, Nickull notes. He also links to a complete history of the PDF format, from Leonard Rosenthal.

Nickull feels the move will give independent developers a road map for contributing to future versions of the PDF specification. "It also makes me immensely proud to be an Adobe Evangelist," he adds.

How do you feel about it?