Free Freehand group files antitrust lawsuit against Adobe
There was a time when the battle for vector creation dominance was a heated battle between Adobe Illustrator and Macromedia Freehand. Illustrator was the dominant player, but not by much. Freehand users were extremely loyal, and the application offered many features that are still absent in Illustrator to this day. All of that changed in 2005 when Adobe acquired Macromedia and discontinued Freehand completely.
Freehand users were absolutely furious. To this day, Illustrator faces no real competition in the professional vector art creation world.
Out of nowhere (for me anyway), a group called Free Freehand has filed an antitrust lawsuit against Adobe Systems, Inc., alleging that Adobe has violated federal and state antitrust laws by abusing its dominant position in the professional vector graphic illustration software market.
I suspect that the group is seeking to have the code for Freehand sold to another party for active development, or donated to the open source community. At this stage of the game, I’m not sure if anyone could resurrect Freehands popularity among professional designers. Illustrator is a great program, and as part of the Adobe Creative Suite it is a staple product for every professional designer; a group that doesn’t take well to drastic change. But it will certainly be interesting to follow the lawsuit.
12 COMMENTS
I need an 11.0.1 Freehand upgrade. Adobe doesn’t support or supply it anymore.
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Freehand was my choice of software in the late nineties. Illustrator really sucked backed then. The pen tool was superior and still is. Freehand appeared to be a victim between the new Flash, and Illustrator 9 and never gained much market share. I do miss freehand and my only request is that Adobe still provide software to resurrect old files.
Freehand is more like old school chevy, and illustrator is japanese fancy sport car…
but right now I can’t deal with freehand, I have to leave behind the glory old days, and freehand run pain in a snowleopard…
Freehand is much easier for learners to pick up and start producing while Illustrator (especially these days) is comparatively daunting. I personally prefer Freehand over Illustrator but then Adobe gulped Macromedia, so …
BTW, this reminds me of my first illustration program at school Canvas (from Deneba).
Cheers.
Originally an Illustrator user, I switched to FreeHand when I came to know it during the 90s, later I was forced to go back to Illustrator which I use now every day. But not with joy. Illustrator was and still is old software, just that now they patch features over features on top of it, but the basics is still the same old thing. Nothing so elegant like FreeHand was. FreeHand was ahead of its time, and probably still does a better job then Illustrator. You don’t see that when doing easy vector or simple prepress work. But for extremely complex illustration artwork like I do, FreeHand still beats Illustrator by miles.
Haha – “peace” of software. “piece” of course. 😉
About 15 years ago i was teacher at one of the biggest multimedia schools here in Cologne, Germany (so excuse my “english”). The vector program we used was Freehand, and it was a great peace of software. Illustrator wasn´t really a challenge for Freehand in that days. But times changed and today Illustrator is the swiss army knife for vector graphics.
What i don´t like in todays situation, is the monopoly of Adobe. Their strange price policy, their massive feature overloaded and partly buggy software, they can only afford because of their monopoly. It reminds me of the arrogant behavior of Quark years ago before InDesign appeared.
So in my opinion, it would be a great idea to get Freehand back to the arena.
The same situation you find with Photoshop. Great program but without any serious competitor. Once a year i take a look at the actual version of Gimp. Perhaps in two or three years…
I still use Freehand from time to time. It was my main vector program for many years. The pen tool was far superior to Illustrators. Illustrators success comes from it’s ability to render vector artwork not so much the creating of the paths. Illustrator is now far superior to what freehand was, but at the time drawing was way easier in freehand. Illustrator other main advantage was the integration with Adobe’s other programs. No way Macromedia could compete with that, they could have made the best program out there but how was Xres going to ever compete with photoshop?
Oh man, I remember Xres. That app was the bomb when it first came out. Layering and compositing long before Photoshop.
Nobody can top Illustrator! I’ve never even seen Freehand on any machine… when I was in school nor in the professional world. I’ve worked at large and small agencies and nobody uses that.
Oh, I remember Freehand fondly! First used it when it belonged to Aldus.
Yes, there was a time when Pagemaker and Freehand were being developed by the same software company. I absolutely loved the way Freehand worked, and I could always squash Illustrator users’ complaints about what Freehand “couldn’t” do with equally cool things that it COULD do.
But, that was then, this is now. Hey, now even Illustrator can create a multi-paged document. Freehand was doing that in 1998!
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