PDF Licensing
 

Where can I get some good information on the PDF format? I found this to be somewhat helpful;

http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/P/PDF.html

However I cannot find the *FORMATS* licensing. Since it was designed by Adobe, I doubt it'd free(dom). My main goal in this is to decide wether or not PDF is ethical and if not, whats a good free(dom) equiv.

This page wikipedia links the pdfspec.pdf which should have the info you want. Page 15 has "Copyright permission to use PDF"


ghostview can convert postscript to/from pdf

PDF format
 

kghostview will display and print PDF files. I prefer using kghostview over acroread.

Since kghostview is released under the GPL you can probably find a description of the PDF file format in the kghostview source code. kghostview does not come as a separate package, as far as I know. In SuSE 8.1 kghostview is part of the kdegraphics3-postscript package.