Prior to Adobe’s acquisition of Macromedia in 2005, Macromedia Freehand was one of the two sole serious competitors in the vector graphics landscape (the other being Adobe’s own Illustrator). Currently the entire market is dominated by Adobe, which has some of Freehand’s loyal users up in arms. Post acquisition, Adobe discontinued Freehand in attempts to produce a forced migration to Illustrator so as to bolster its user-base, and cease any further development. The Free Freehand organization was created in response to this action by Adobe, and has since filed a civil antitrust complaint in the U.S. District Court of the Northern District of California against Adobe Systems Inc. Free Freehand hopes that such a suit will pressure Adobe into either updating the source code to a stable state that operates on modern operating systems, or to release the source code and license it to the open source community (presumably under a license such as the GPL, MIT, BSD, or MPL licenses). This would allow for further development, and possibly the release of Freehand as free (gratis) software.

It is interesting that this movement has come to light as it is not without precedent, given Freehand’s varied past. Freehand was created by Atsys Corporation in 1988, and was licensed to Aldus Corporation through version 4. In 1994 Aldus merged with Adobe, who produced competitors to many of Aldus’ products (such as Illustrator and Photoshop). Altsys sued Aldus on the basis that the merger was a break of the terms of their licensing agreement. This response was due in part to extensive media coverage of the concern expressed by consumers that Adobe would become a de facto monopoly. The Federal Trade Commission agreed, and issued a complaint stating that Adobe could not acquire any professional illustration software within the next 10 years without the commission’s approval. In late 1994, Altsys was acquired by Macromedia, who produced updates to the product through 2004. The acquisition of Macromedia by Adobe conveniently occurred 11 years after their merger with Aldus, thus circumventing any legal action. Considering that competition spurs innovation, it would be thrilling to see Free Freehand succeed.

Via: The Graphic Mac