Slashdot Mirror

This article on heise-online reveals some more information on the KIllustrator dispute. If my understanding of the German article is correct, the lawyer firm of Reinhard Skuhra Weise & Partner has issued a cease and desist letter to the University of Magdeburg, employer of KIllustrator's author, Dr Kai-Uwe Sattler. The cease-and-desist letter complains that kIllustrator's advertising damages Adobe's brand-name and damages the reputation of Adobe's product. The lawyers required that the University sign the cease and desist letter, destroy the kIllustrator-package, name every KIllustrator user, and disclose the profit they made from it. Finally the lawyers sent a bill for 4686 DM (German Marks, approximately 2000 dollars) not counting value added tax. Should the University not sign, the lawyers will sue for a million DM (approximately 400 thousand dollars) . Kai-Uwe Sattler is happy to change the name, but doesn't want to pay this bill. When he suggested changing the name, the lawyers rejected his proposal saying "Do you know any lawyer who works for nothing?" The lawyers insist on payment. Sattler regrets that Adobe never contacted him before calling upon lawyers to ask him to change the name of his software. Udo Skuhra, who works at the lawyers' firm, refused to talk to heise-online about the cease-and-desist letter, and refused to state whether Adobe asked his law-firm to issue it. Update: 07/04 03:30 PM by S :Joerg from Germany sent us a small correction: Apparently the lawyers want any packaging of KIllustrator destroyed, not the project itself. Perhaps they think it comes in a box?

Rockhead writes: "Just saw this over at MacWeek. It looks like Deneba will be porting Canvas, their graphics, layout and kitchen-sink program, to Linux. The free beta is expected on the Deneba Web site early next month. Whoopee!" Let's hope that the release of free-beer proprietary vector programs spurs, rather than impedes, progress on KIllustrator and Sketch, both of which look great but incomplete at this point, but hold great promise in expanding Linux's meager selection of vector-drawing tools. Canvas also has some page-layout abilities -- looks like Deneba is seeing Adobe's free FrameMaker download for Linux, and raising.