Let's Move Forward Quickly --McIlroy

The main issue, as critics point out, is that after so much work has gone into JDF, it would be a painful setback for NGP to create some kind of proprietary restrictions on that openness.

It reminds me mostly of the long road to color management. Setting standards was hugely difficult because, as with JDF, each vendor had a proprietary interest to promote, whether it was commercially motivated or simply a technical requirement. The result was that the standard was years in development and constantly in flux. As I pointed out in my earlier column on JDF, two respected industry analysts looking at color management concluded that "despite a decade of hype about how universal adoption will be as rapid as it is inevitable, the concept loosely known as color management isn't even close to becoming mainstream."