|
All Quiet on the (North)Western
Front
a report by PlanetDjVu, June 10,
2003 We are, of
course, referring to LizardTech in Seattle, WA in the title of this
report. We are as
curious as you most likely are about what is happening now with DjVu at
LizardTech. Our first
concern is that our application for a commercial license to the DjVuLibre
library is being completely ignored - we have not even had the courtesy of
an acknowledgement from LizardTech that we have made this request, unlike
the other 3 intellectual property owners of DjVuLibre. Our next
concern is that the DjVu browser plugin has not been updated since March.
There are a number of problems to be fixed, as documented in the DjVu
Plugin forum of this website. Our
ongoing concern is about the page-pricing model for DjVu products from
LizardTech, which we do not think the market is accepting - and this
concern is renewed by the recent release of Acrobat 6, which now offers
unlimited JBIG2 and JPEG2000 compression of PDF with batch processing, all
in the base product. The new
price for unlimited compression in PDF, from Adobe: $400
The
continuing price for unlimited compression in DjVu, from LizardTech: over
$15,000 DjVu users
who have tried to contact LizardTech report that their phone messages go
unanswered. Of course,
our greatest concern here is that LizardTech has been unwilling to discuss
the licensing of our commercial DjVu applications for public release for
over 9 months now. We were
hopeful when LizardTech got a new CEO, Scott Land, but we haven't heard a
word from him, publicly or otherwise, and the management page of the
LizardTech website has been removed altogether. We, and
the folks at DjVuLibre are doing all we can to keep DjVu afloat, but if
LizardTech continues to be a dead weight, the ship will surely sink!
Truth be told, it is sinking already, judging by the rapidly
diminishing hits on this website. If you are
reading this, you are likely one of the few who is still tracking the
evolution (or de-evolution) of DjVu. If you are
passionate and concerned about DjVu as we are, we invite you to write to
Scott Land, the interim CEO of LizardTech, at sland@lizardtech.com. Then
if you care to, report your findings in the Forum of PlanetDjVu, which is
the only forum on the web (outside of DjVuLibre) for the DjVu user
community. |