The story of PostScript has many different facets. It is a story about profound changes in human literacy as well as a story of trade secrets within source code. It is a story about the importance of teams, and of geometry. And it is a story of the motivations and educations of engineer-entrepreneurs.
The Computer History Museum is excited to publicly release, for the first time, the source code for the breakthrough printing technology, PostScript. We thank Adobe, Inc. for their permission and support, and John Warnock for championing this release.
There’s definitely progress being made when it comes to open sourcing old software, but we’ve still got a long, long way to go for this to become the norm – as it should be.
There’s progress here, but not when it comes to open sourcing software, the Computer History Museum is very careful to say “release” rather than “open”, and if you check the actual code, there’s a specific license that specify that you can’t actually do anything with the code. You can compile it and use it (yourself) for educational purposes, but that’s it. You can copy, publish, revise, whatever. This is anything but open source, heavens forbid free software.
Obviously I’m all for open sourcing old software, but I think modern software trends are quite troubling for computer historians including “adobe cloud” under remote control.
In similar fashion to corporations remotely disabling software, others want to take away the colors you were allowed to use in the past if you don’t pay their subscription fees.
“Pantone requires a $15 monthly subscription to use its colors in apps like Photoshop and Illustrator. Colors in old PSD files are turning black for some.”
https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/1/23434305/adobe-pantone-subscription-announcement-photoshop-illustrator
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qMWAY8Cdsz0 I Have to Pirate COLOURS Now?? – Pantone Connect + Adobe split
You’d think that paying thousands of dollars for their books and color cards would entitle you to actually use those colors in software, but no now their customers additionally have to pay another $15/mo for that.
Even if that amount of money means little to a corporation, what I find unacceptable is that now pantone’s got a kill switch to disable colors after the fact. This is a very good reason to avoid using them for commercial work – you’d better make sure all your work is backed up with full CMYK and not just pantone colors.
I don’t mind pantone wanting to charge for software and even updates…but to retroactively disable colors in graphics files is egregious. It highlights the problem with relying on software as a service and forced updates that aren’t in our interests. Consumers become helplessly dependent on the corporations who are holding them hostage.
Perhaps it’s time to use an open standard like CIE Lab (ISO 12647 & co) instead of a proprietary solution like Pantone?
jgfenix,
I have no connections to the printing/graphics industry myself, but I agree, I’m all about open standards. While there is value in calibration cards, etc, it’s pretty clear that pantone wants to reshape the business model around rent-seeking without actually doing anything more to earn customer’s money.
Someone on the Internet pointed out, people tried, and they got buried by Pantone.
Nice! I wonder how this will help Ghostscript?
Flatland_Spider,
I think the publication of historical ~35 year old tech is more of academic interest than practical these days. It’s like microsoft publishing the source for ms dos 1. Nothing wrong with this, but it’s well past it’s prime and there’s not likely much technical value to FOSS software given that we’ve already evolved passed it.