Adobe Threatens Microsoft With Suit

lseltzer writes "Adobe has threatened an antitrust suit against Microsoft, over PDF writing in Office 2007. Adobe wants Microsoft to separate the feature and charge extra for it. Microsoft has agreed to remove PDF writing, but won't charge extra." From the eWeek article: "In February, Adobe Chief Executive Bruce Chizen told Reuters he considered Microsoft to be the company's biggest concern. 'The competitor I worry about most is Microsoft,' Chizen said at the time. Adobe's PDF technology lets producers create and distribute documents digitally that retain designs, pictures and formatting. "

Comments

So

[Anonymous Coward]

will they be coming after pdftex/pdflatex next?
Or ps2pdf?

Whats the point of opening the spec for PDF, if you don't want other people's applications to be able to write them?

I used the PDF export in Office 2007 Beta 2

[timecop]

And it's great.
Its integrated, its almost as quick as saving the file, and most of all, it doesn't require 300megs of crappy Adobe junk to be installed which hogs your system, installs a printer driver, and adds its toolbars to every fucking application.

I hope microsoft does NOT remove PDF export functionality, because the alternative (adobe acrobat) is annoying and bloated. Sure, it might have OCR and some other niceties, but it should stick to that, instead of trying to take over every document publishing app on my PC.

So why isn't Adobe expected to sue Apple?

[dunsurfin]

So why isn't Adobe expected to sue Apple? Print to PDF is an integral part of OS X.

Software Dictatorship

[B_SharpC]

Software is a dictatorship eg Microsoft. Other businesses are more fairly partnerships eg law partnerships, real estate partnerships, medical etc.

It is because techies have such poor social skills. They talk of libertarian ideals but in reality are mostly doormats who feel safer with a monolithic dictator. Nerds sadly trade proper ownership for the false substitute of being controlled by surrogate big daddy.

Adobe software is fighting a losing battle in a totalitarian industry where the tech worker attitude enables tyranny.

Re:Playing Devil's Advocate here

[falcon5768]

very valid reason (well on Microsofts part) They want to release a "superior format" and lock people into it by removing it from thier software and saying Adobe made us do it.

Basically they are flat out lying to ruin adobe by getting the idiot masses to rebel against Adobe.

Clearly FUD

[LWGLIN]

It's clearly FUD. There is absolutely no ground for such a lawsuite. Everybody can write a PDF engine and distribute it for free.
The proof? Adobe is shipping a product (MacroMedia's Cold Fusion Server) with my F/OSS library iText to produce PDF from Cold Fusion pages. I never heard anybody at Adobe complain because I wrote a free PDF engine.
As a PDF specialist I know that the big money isn't in the conversion from Word to PDF. PDF is a lot more than text documents. The Acrobat product family is used for completely different reasons than a product like MS Word or a free library like iText.

Re:What's the Correct One?

[Whiney Mac Fanboy]

Why is Adobe refusing to comment on it?

Why do you say that? All I could see in the article was: Representatives of Microsoft and Adobe were not immediately reachable for comment. - that's not refusing to comment.

Now, I suspect the reason Microsoft & Adobe have been negotiating, is over rights to use Adobes proprietary DRM extensions (the ones that are not implemeneted by openoffice, Apple's print to PDF feature, etc).

When negotiations broke down (who knows what reason for, perhaps Adobe was trying to screw MS or vice versa), MS was left without being able to fully support PDF.

There's no reasonable reading of the story that doesn't include an Adobe threat of legal action.

You haven't been following Microsoft stories for long have you?