Alphax said:
So Adobe "owns" PDF in the same sense that Sun "owns" Java.
Yes. That is, only in the sense that Adobe has a registered trademark on the name "PDF" and exercises control over the standard. They don't own or control third-party PDF readers or writers.
I've been meaning to get into the TeX thing for a while now... can DVIs be HTMLified? Can TeX have links in it?
You can htmlize a DVI, but then it will be HTML, which is not a presentation format, so you have no real control over what it will look like.