[exikyut]

I'm only vaguely aware of the de-proprietary-ization of PDF; I remember at some point the market was flooded with print-to-PDF software, and commentary that this was happening because of something had somehow changed.

What happened?

[jandrese]

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.