[vent]
Wow. I guess I was really naive thinking that FreeFreehand could/would get anywhere. Basically what has been accomplished is to hand over our emails & serials to Adobe, waste our time & efforts and land us a sweet discount on a big pile of sh!t that none of us wants.
Obviously I'm not a lawyer, but why on earth would this org even go into negotiations with Adobe, accepting its terms!? Let's see...
Adobe discloses nothing, FreeFreehand discloses everything. Was there no hardball played at all?! It seems to me that if FreeFreehand got the generous "offer" from Adobe to sit down & discuss AI improvements, they should have declined on the spot. The primary goal should have been to
free freehand , right?! I'm sorry, for me, "improving" AI is not an option because #1: it isn't possible, and #2: it's overpriced and a pig to begin with.
[/vent]
OK, so the odds of kicking Adobe's a$$ legally were slim to nill. When you have Adobe's finances, it's easy to pay for what you want and have it "legally" upheld.
And, in order to temper my above vent, FreeFreehand's action was productive in that it was a necessary step. At least we now know how to move forward, and that is good. So, as others have mentioned, Freehand is dead (at least the original). Therefore, the open source route is really the only viable option for getting decent software (& taking a chunk out of Adobe). Linux may not be hurting M$ much on the desktop, but it is making inroads on the server side (where the real $$$ is). I also believe that lighter & nimble is the future of software. This is the opposite of Adobe's bloat and charge approach - add some lame bells & whistles and charge $$$ for another upgrade cycle.
Pay-for-bloat software companies other strategy is to create "new" standards/formats in order to abandon & invalidate old ones, creating new revenue bases. Here again, Adobe is a good example with "OpenType". Supposedly, Type 1 fonts were an old, rather limited format, so we needed OpenType, right?. But, if you research this, Type 1 was (and still is) a very capable format, but abandoning it suddenly outdated everyone's font library and, voila! new market!
BTW Adobe, you can stick your discount you-know-where. Oh, and that email address? It was an easily changeable alias.