Adobe made the file format open source to spur adoption. It worked.
Make no mistake, there were a good number of PDFs floating around before that point. It was pretty much immediately popular, but they were kind of a hassle for everybody not running Windows. There were programs to display them like xpdf, but they weren't bug compatible and lived in a legal grey area. Everything got a lot better once Adobe released the rights on the format.
Make no mistake, there were a good number of PDFs floating around before that point. It was pretty much immediately popular, but they were kind of a hassle for everybody not running Windows. There were programs to display them like xpdf, but they weren't bug compatible and lived in a legal grey area. Everything got a lot better once Adobe released the rights on the format.