Ah yes, Adobe, bastions of the creative world, and pain in the neck to all. Currently, as always, Adobe are up to some pretty dirty tricks. We're already seeing millions of users stuck with their deliberately crippled software -- Adobe Acrobat, Flash Player. Now comes Adobe AIR hand in hand with another sad story about the BBC:
The BBC has chosen AIR for its iPlayer download application for GNU/Linux and Mac OS X -- despite both these platforms being able to run a variety of free software applications for handling video, and despite the BBC's efforts to bring a DRM-free version of iPlayer to the iPhone and iPod Touch -- devices running the same operating system core as desktop and laptop Macintosh computers.
With AIR and Flash, the BBC and others have locked up culture and handed the keys to the proprietarists, while its flagship product, Adobe Acrobat Reader continues to baffle and frustrate its users with near-constant updates and 'fixes' -- fixes designed to keep users subjugated and controlled, by forcing updates to its DRM, both on eBooks (a move that ended with a Russian programmer in jail - thanks to Adobe) and on regular PDF content.
The solution? Unsurprisingly is free software...
- Gnash and Swfdec provide alternatives to Adobe Flash
- There are a variety of free PDF readers for all the major platforms.