Earlier this week I traveled up to
During our meeting the discussion moved to DWF and the group was under the impression that DWF was a proprietary Autodesk format. I run into this misconception often – it’s easy to see why because DWF does come from Autodesk but it’s actually an open platform.
Autodesk created DWF as an open standard based on technology that any developer can access free of charge. You can visit the Autodesk DWF page for more information. Also be sure to check out Scott Sheppard’s blog: Beyond the Paper for daily updates on how customers are taking advantage of this popular and powerful platform.
I believe Microsoft is working on a version of Office that is server based. It is conceivable that users would pay for time used instead of purchasing the software up front at full price and then using it in an unlimited fashion.
Posted by: Scott Sheppard | January 26, 2007 at 05:40 AM
DWF is an open standard. Some people confuse "open" with "proprietary." Autodesk listens to its customers in terms of making changes to the format instead of following a slow-moving committee process. I guess that makes DWF proprietary; however, Autodesk provides the DWF specification, and even the source code for reading and writing DWF files, to anyone free of charge - even competitors. How much more open can you get? Furthermore DWF is based on other industry standards such as ZIP/ZLIB, XML, JPG/PNG/bitonal-G4-Tiff, and HSF. So although there is no specific ISO standard's body for DWF itself, DWF is an open standard made from formats that are industry standards.
Posted by: Scott Sheppard | January 26, 2007 at 08:05 AM
Thanks Scott, I think the open source code available for free and using other accepted industry standards like Zip and XML to base DWF on is great! Perhaps we'll have to come up with another term for our 'openness'. Something like 'open with out the anchor' or 'open w/o the bureaucracy’.
Posted by: mgemmell | January 29, 2007 at 07:23 AM