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Can Proprietary Formats make Government More Open?

Three interesting comments!

  • Adobe is Bad for Open Government, by Clay Johnson, Sunlight Labs
  • Adobe is Bad for Open Government, comment, by kathy and ernie brandon, Open House Project mailing list, (10/28/2009).

    “Once private ownership is established in something like this we aren’t getting it out again, not without another draining fight. Most people start out saying “I don’t really have a problem with this” until I take them down the road this leads – private ownership means ‘trade secrets’, ‘trade secrets’ is the opposite of transparency.”

  • Adobe is Bad for Open Government, comment, by Josh Tauberer, Open House Project mailing list, (10/28/2009).

    “Government has a responsibility to issue print-ready documents in many cases, so PDFs are an important part of an open government. I would rather have PDFs over nothing electronic, over electronic image files, and over other formats suitable for printing — PDF is an open standard (albeit proprietary).

    “I wouldn’t want to get rid of PDFs. Docs need to either be published in a second format, or — more interesting — we could get Adobe to revise the PDF format so that it can encode the document in structured form as well. That means govt publishes a single file that makes everyone happy.”

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