{"id":6275,"date":"2015-07-16T08:38:50","date_gmt":"2015-07-16T08:38:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/xislblogs.xtreamlab.net\/slwoods\/?p=6275"},"modified":"2015-07-16T08:39:52","modified_gmt":"2015-07-16T08:39:52","slug":"pdf-a-religion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.slwoods.co.uk\/?p=6275","title":{"rendered":"PDF – a religion?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Amongst some technology enthusiasts free and open source software is promoted with a zeal approaching that of Christian evangelism, i.e. the preaching of the gospel or the practice of giving information about a particular doctrine or set of beliefs to others with the intention of converting others to the Christian faith.<\/p>\n

Does this mean that free and open source software – also referred to by the acronym FOSS – is now a religion?<\/p>\n

Richard Stallman<\/a> – founder of the GNU Project<\/a> and the Free Software Foundation<\/a> – has been known to appear at events in pseudo-religious garb masquerading as his alter ego, St IGNucius of the Church of Emacs<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Since the foundation of the FOSS movement a couple of decades ago, there have been many developments in information technology and the working of the internet.<\/p>\n

Of these one of the most notable is the development by Google of predictive search terms; as one types, Google tries to anticipate the final search string. This can have some interesting results, as evidenced by the screenshot below.<\/p>\n

\"screenshot<\/p>\n

PDF – Portable Document Format – was originally a proprietary standard developed by Adobe Systems. It was released as an open standard on 1st July 1 2008 and published by the International Organization for Standardization as ISO 32000-1:2008, at which time control of the specification passed to an ISO Committee of volunteer industry experts.<\/p>\n

No information is available as to when Judaism, Islam and Catholicism are to be released as open standards under the auspices of the International Organization for Standardization. \ud83d\ude09<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Amongst some technology enthusiasts free and open source software is promoted with a zeal approaching that of Christian evangelism, i.e. the preaching of the gospel or the practice of giving information about a particular doctrine or set of beliefs to others with the intention of converting others to the Christian faith. Does this mean that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":20,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,17,5,9],"tags":[19,12,23],"class_list":["post-6275","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-linux-and-os-matters","category-oddities","category-open-source-software","category-tech","tag-free-software","tag-open-source","tag-tech-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.slwoods.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6275","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.slwoods.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.slwoods.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.slwoods.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/20"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.slwoods.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6275"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.slwoods.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6275\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6278,"href":"https:\/\/www.slwoods.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6275\/revisions\/6278"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.slwoods.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6275"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.slwoods.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6275"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.slwoods.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6275"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}