On 2/13/20 9:58 AM, Bernhard E. Reiter wrote:
It is hard work to "track" what the proprietary developers of the PDF format do and it needs people that do this for years, which means they need to be financed. We at Intevation were toying with how this can be done a few time, but haven't found something promissing yet. Maybe a crowd-funding for some features? But the work can probably not be estimated well enough. A pay-as-you-want windows build of okular? Maybe, but it needs serious time invest and expertise.
The problem is: Getting somewhere with better form handling in PDF, we are not looking at a 20 k€ project, but it would need years with funding around 200 k€ per year or more to get somewhere.
I haven't worked with PDF implementations, but €200k/year sound reasonable for an actual program to track the functionality of proprietary developers and hopefully lead the way on some points.
Ironically, or perhaps rather: Tragically, this would be easy to do if public authorities were focused on using free software in their daily work. With pooling of resources, they could get a lot of these things done and end up with software that was free and in the end also technically better as well as cheaper and more flexible for each customer. But they are not, and as a result there's much less resources available for free software development, and hence some core products are perceived to be lacking.
And that's something advocacy *can* do: Change this political understanding and hence make public organisations (among others) dedicate more funds to development of software that is not only good, but also free.
Best Carsten