Hi!
About your list of open PDF readers for mac: MuPDF isn't available for Mac OS X. Vindaloo hasn't been touched by it's author in the past 5 years, and the binarie that he offer on his website is only a ppc version.
And can you explain to me how "preview" (the PDF viewer on MacOS) doesn't allow me "to control my own privacy and data"?
Cheers.
Hi there!
First of all, thank you for your interest in the PDFReaders-Campaign.
On Wednesday 13 October 2010 11:00:06 willie thepimp wrote:
Hi!
About your list of open PDF readers for mac: MuPDF isn't available for Mac OS X. Vindaloo hasn't been touched by it's author in the past 5 years, and the binarie that he offer on his website is only a ppc version.
We are aware of the situation on OSX and are working with Free Software developers to improve the availability of technically superior pdfreaders on the Mac-Platform.
And can you explain to me how "preview" (the PDF viewer on MacOS) doesn't allow me "to control my own privacy and data"?
The "preview" program -- as many other parts of the Mac-Desktop -- is proprietary software. That means it is not Free Software, as described here [1]. Concerning privacy this means, your "preview" program might gather statistics about which files you look at and send those statistics to a third party, e.g. when you install updates. I am not saying that it does, but it could do so without you knowing, because not you and noone else can look at the source code that the program was built from. Another example would be the software not showing certain documents or even deleting them, because the supplier does not agree with the content you want to display. There are numerous examples of beheviour like that [2].
Free Software has its Source Code in the open and grants you many freedems with it, so many interested parties can verify that the program only does what it's supposed to. Undesired behaviour will be found quickly and new versions released that don't show it.
I hope this example was helpful, if you have further questions feel free to ask.
Hi Hannes!
Before replying , i'd like to mention that i'm aware of the concepts related to the OSS, and my intention isn't to troll you. I really appreciate the action of the FSF, even if i don't agree with everything.
On Thu, Oct 14, 2010 at 6:49 PM, Hannes Hauswedell h2@fsfe.org wrote:
Hi there!
First of all, thank you for your interest in the PDFReaders-Campaign.
On Wednesday 13 October 2010 11:00:06 willie thepimp wrote:
Hi!
About your list of open PDF readers for mac: MuPDF isn't available for Mac OS X. Vindaloo hasn't been touched by it's author in the past 5 years, and the binarie that he offer on his website is only a ppc version.
We are aware of the situation on OSX and are working with Free Software developers to improve the availability of technically superior pdfreaders on the Mac-Platform.
Ok, but right now there is no version of MuPDF for Mac OS, so why providing a link to it? Vindaloo's binaries are 5 years old, the library it use to render the PDF has been patched many times in 5 years[1], running this binaries is not secure. Also, it's compiled only for the ppc platform, people running the latest version of OS X, won't be able to run it, people running slightly older version of OS X on an intel machine will have it running inside and emulator, the application will be slow to start, and i'm afraid it might give a bad impression about free software. Xpdf require X! Why not linking to Skim[2], which is a **native** PDF viewer for OSX, under a BSD license, and having some advantages over the default app?
Cheers, peter.
[1] http://poppler.freedesktop.org/releases.html [2] http://skim-app.sourceforge.net/
Hi Peter,
Ok, but right now there is no version of MuPDF for Mac OS, so why providing a link to it? Vindaloo's binaries are 5 years old, the library it use to render the PDF has been patched many times in 5 years[1], running this binaries is not secure. Also, it's compiled only for the ppc platform, people running the latest version of OS X, won't be able to run it, people running slightly older version of OS X on an intel machine will have it running inside and emulator, the application will be slow to start, and i'm afraid it might give a bad impression about free software. Xpdf require X!
Indeed, the situation on OSX is not ideal. We will discuss the recommendations for OSX further in the team.
Why not linking to Skim[2], which is a **native** PDF viewer for OSX, under a BSD license, and having some advantages over the default app?
Skim uses the proprietary PDFKit-backend for rendering PDF. Since the rendering component is the core of a PDF-Reader, we can't recommend Skim. Similarly we don't recommend Firefox with a proprietary plugin, as a free PDF-Reader.
I hope you understand that. Maybe you can convince the Skim developers to switch to a free backend. IIRC there is popplerKit aswell, although I am not sure on the current status.
Best Regards, Hannes