Adobe releases Acrobat 7 with Linux reader support

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LINUX Users Should Embrace OEM Support

I've been running Gentoo LINUX as my primary operating system for more than a year now and I have absolutely no regrets. I applaud Adobe for embracing the LINUX platform and making the latest release of the Acrobat Reader software availalbe on the LINUX platform. I wish more vendors would follow suit.

IMHO people who truly love LINUX and want it to garner more of a presence in the software world should embrace any software product being made available natively on LINUX. It is especially fantastic to see a vendor of Adobe's calibre supporting a platform I've grown to love. The more commercial software vendors who support the LINUX platform, the more choice we'll have in terms of applications. We have to realize that the current market consists of some who are able to make a living using the "Professional Open Source" model, but there are far more that follow traditional commercial stratagies. As a software developer, I respect both approaches and give props to those who are able to make professional open source work. That business strategy is proving effective, but it is still in it's nascent stages of development.

Right now, the LINUX software market is in a chicken and egg scenario. Software publishers won't produce native LINUX applications until they see a market and the market won't develop until the applications are available. While there are open source equivalents for many commercial software products, sometimes people don't have the latitude to choose the product they want to use.

For example, the GIMP is a great program and does everything I need for photo editing and graphics creation. Open Office meets my business productivity needs (I can share documents by exporting to .PDF).

My wife, however, is a professional graphic designer. She uses Adobe Photoshop and Quark Express extensively. Since those products dominate her industry, there's no way she's would switch to LINUX becuase she can't run the programs she uses in her job. (It's not all bad ... Mac OS X rocks and the Apple hardware is awesome!)

At the end of the day, I'd rather run native LINUX binaries whether they're commercial software or open source software. VMWare, CrossOver Office, and Win4Lin are great when you need to run a Windows application ... but they just add overhead (some more than others). Go Adobe!

Posted by: derek.berube@...   Posted on: 01/06/05 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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