Adobe's recent unethical actions

[Matt Graham]

Ben Pfaff <pfaffben@msu.edu> wrote:
> Matt Graham <danceswithcrows@usa.net> writes:
> > Programmers already have reasons to hate Adobe...)
>
> Really? Totally off-topic but I didn't know about these. The
> only programming connections I have with Adobe have been through
> PostScript and a PDF forms library. PostScript is a dream; it
> lets me beautiful graphics with very little code, things that I
> never would have even thought about doing without it. The PDF
> forms library was okay, too.
 
I originally said "the programmers on our dev team already have reasons
to hate Adobe," said programmers being the ones who work for Group
InfoTech.  Not programmers in general.
 
Y'see, they were putting together a package that could manipulate
scanned images in various twisty ways and produce PDFs from them. The
lead programmer asked Adobe about licensing some PDF generation code.
Adobe took a look at what the dev team was doing and got very
concerned/annoyed, then said, "Forget it, we're not licensing our code
to someone who could potentially compete in our application space." [0]
Acrimonious words were exchanged.  Adobe will still sell us products,
but is unwilling to let us license code.  Thus, our main product
generates PDFs through a clumsy external link with Adobe PDFWriter,
and this clumsy link has resulted in at least 2 Nasty Hacks.
 
I probably have the exact details wrong because it all happened before I
started working there, but Adobe is not being friendly to our
programming team.
 
Programmers in general have a different opinion, if only because raw
PostScript allows them to put those old Forth skills to some use.  Yes,
I saw P. da Silva's winning entry in the Obfuscated Postscript Contest,
and was struck by a combined flaskback of shape tables on the old Apple
][s and the HP-28S I used to use for math class.  ASR can damage your
sanity....
 
[0] Not Photoshop, nor even Acrobat. Distiller.  It's bollocks; we have
5.5 programmers (I count as 0.5 of a programmer, since I've written
chunks of code but writing code is not in my job description), only 2 of
them are near "wizard level", and we're currently working on 3 totally
different projects.  We do customized stuff for a highly specialized
market, which Adobe has either screwed up or completely ignored.



-- 
Matt G / Dances With Crows
There is no Darkness in Eternity/But only Light too dim for us to see
"I backed up my brain to tape, but tar says the tape contains no data...."