They also welcome your input about the most needed features you want. Tell us now:

For the lawsuit to proceed successfully, we need to provide the court with a record of all FFH members who are participating in the suit against Adobe. It is critical that your name is added to the list if you have already signed up with your email. A key piece of this is to prove that we are all legitimate users of FreeHand and other vector graphic illustration products.

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Court’s Schedule

FreeHand users sue Adobe for ‘killing’ the application | Macworld

Illustrator monopoly class action lawsuit | Topclassactions

FreeHand users file antitrust lawsuit | Macnews

FreeHand users sue Adobe for ‘killing’ the application | Digital Arts

Adobe draws ugly picture of graphics software market | Thomson Reuters

FreeHand Isn’t Frees | Sonnymoon

Software Illustrators Draw Up Complaint Against Adobe | Antitrust Today

Adobe Sued for Killing FreeHand | Planet Quark

FreeHand, the old drawing app | Copydesk

Free Freehand group files antitrust lawsuit against Adobe | The Graphic Mac

Tech Policy & Law News | Betanews

FreeFreeHand against Adobe | Macuser.ro

Software-tool goes to court | Skyvington blog

Adobe vs Quark, History repeating itself | Macuser UK

Adobe Faces Antitrust Monopoly Class Action | Courthousenews

Illustrators draw up complaint against Adobe | BFI waste management info

See You In Court Adobe! | Sam Grant Design

Freeing Macromedia Freehand | The Cloud Nine Design

As Adobe gets sued for killing FreeHand, Corel gently offers its alternatives | International Business Times

DOCUMENTS

Free FreeHand Corp. (plaintiffs) vs. Adobe Systems Inc. (defendant)
Class Action Complaint (PDF)

Adobe Systems Inc. Motion To Dismiss (PDF)

Free FreeHand: Opposition to Adobe’s Motion to Dismiss (PDF)

U.S. District Court: Minute Order & Case Management Order (PDF)

OTHER ARTICLES

I ♥ FreeHand | Exploriment

Free FreeHand | NosalCentral

We have exciting news to share. Free FreeHand has filed a civil antitrust complaint in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California against Adobe Systems, Inc. The work of reaching this important milestone has spanned most of 2010, and we are pleased to be sharing this momentous accomplishment with you.

The suit alleges that Adobe has violated federal and state antitrust laws by abusing its dominant position in the professional vector graphic illustration software market. Free FreeHand alleges that Adobe has engaged in a series of exclusionary and anticompetitive acts and strategies designed to kill FreeHand, the dominant competitor to Adobe’s Illustrator software product, instead of competing on the basis of product merit according to the principals of free market capitalism.

Free FreeHand demands that Adobe be permanently enjoined from engaging in acts of monopolization and that competitive conditions be restored in the marketplace – we are pursuing all available remedies in court.    A satisfactory result could be reached quickly or take a considerable amount of time depending on Adobe’s legal response, and members can expect progress updates along the way.

Requests for information or questions may be directed to our legal counsel:

Jared H. Beck, Esq.
Elizabeth Lee Beck, Esq.
Beck & Lee Business Trial Lawyers
66 W. Flagler St. Suite 1000
Miami, FL 33130
ph: (305) 789-0072
jared@beckandlee.com
elizabeth@beckandlee.com

“Company surviving due to past success – no new innovation.”

“Riding past successes, hopefully continues to survive,
pretends to be progressive but is actually fairly insular.”

“Once a great company, now on decline”

Over the past years, I’ve read plenty of criticism of Adobe and its policies on sites like ours and on design blogs and online forums. In fact, I have written plenty of them myself over the recent years both here and on Adobe’s FreeHand Forum. But reading the above quotes take on a whole different meaning when I realize that these are not from disappointed customers or media pundits or members of Free FreeHand.  These quotes are from Adobe employees! Yes, that’s right, Adobe employees and not just low level workers but managers, engineers, and developers. These criticisms are also from persons working at Adobe’s own headquarters in San Jose/San Francisco, not the satellite divisions in India or Europe or elsewhere.

We tend to think of a corporation like Adobe being a huge monolith of employees blindly following their bosses orders and solidly believing the company ethos. I am finding that not to be true and that Adobe employees do not always walk in lock-step with management, particularly senior management. We FreeHand users have been severely damaged by the dictates of Adobe management and its CEO, but I am seeing that those dictates aren’t necessarily the held belief of the rest of the company. In fact,  there is a high degree of individual thought and downright objection to the practices imposed by senior management and these employees (while also having good things to say about Adobe) are very real in public about their experience and viewpoints:

“We need to get back to our core and the values we were founded on. We need to make products that delight customers and treat customers with more respect (instead of business policies).”

“Ignore Wall Street, but don’t ignore the low-morale within the company. Worry about making a difference to your customers. Quit making small, hedged bets…that is a way to create mediocre products, not a way to create successful products. Make sure quality is a key priority in the company; outside of their own organization, most people have no faith in other Adobe products.”

“It would terrific to stop paying just lip service to innovation and take a gamble on some of the new cool ideas.”

“A strong company needs strong leadership, but what’s happening now is many managers are inept and are only interested in their own interests, not the interests of the company. That is where a great company like Adobe starts to fall down. Adobe is in a leadership crisis, and it needs better managers.”

“Look past the spreadsheets and see the people your actions affect, do the right thing.”

“Fix the broken internal processes, make it easier for people to communicate, and find more ways to listen to our customers. Fight complacency.”

“Cost cutting comes at a price. Your quality is suffering due to extreme cost cutting measures.
Frequent reorgs and the lack of leadership to transition into reorg has cost the company
Oh & how about innovating – new versions of CS & Acrobat can only do so much.”

“You are losing the trust and loyalty of people, at the time when you are not attracting new talent. You have good focus on cutting costs and releasing new versions of existing products, you need to really emphasis innovative technologies and products, that will energize current employees too.”

The source of these comments come from a site I recently discovered, Glassdoor.com.  Glassdoor is a free inside look at jobs and companies. Salary details, company reviews, and interview questions — all posted anonymously by employees and job seekers. It is publicly available and a resource for job hunting and sharing. What I am reprinting here are the comments made by Adobe employees who posted under the Glassdoor topic: Advice to Senior Management. But I recommend visiting the site and reading these yourself as there are also the topics of Pros and Cons for working at Adobe. Needless to say, the Cons topic can be much more biting than the quotes I posted in this blog and quite revealing about the inner world of Adobe.  Glassdoor.com/Reviews/Adobe-San-Jose

“get more aggressive about driving innovation. Stop trying to protect our shrink wrap empire at the expense of new technology that will pave the way in the next 20 years.”

“Focus on innovation. Quit trying to please Wall Street at the expense of your human resources. Try to keep some jobs in the US. Focus on improving the quality of what used to be amazing products – they’ve become too bloated and buggy. Bring back Chuck, John and Bruce to revitalize company mission.”

“Stop worrying about others (Apple, etc.) and stay focused on what you can do to innovate and improve the products we make, and what the current and future needs of our customers are.”

“The co-chairmen of the board need to “clean house” of the current top executives and bloated management teams just as they did in 1998 if they expect Adobe to regain traction and succeed in the long term.”

“Please focus on Adobe’s strengths (such as Acrobat and Creative Suite) and bring the company back to the respectable company that it once was. Running in all different directions because ‘the street’ say that is where growth potential is going to be is just destroying the company.”

“Look into other options, flash is not the answer to everything. Overall, I feel there needs to be more innovation.”

“Be less of a follower and go after real innovation. Commit to new products and markets and win them. Don’t just go after products after the competitors have already won the market.”

“Company is scrambling to find profitable new products as the Creative Suite cash cow is running dry.”

“Fix things with Steve Jobs!”

The Glassdoor.com site is regularly updated with new comments, so add your latest finds to our Forum. If you have any past experience as an Adobe employee, your comments on its culture and environment would be interesting especially as to how it relates to the decisions made around FreeHand, GoLive, and other dropped applications. Visit our forum here:
http://freefreehand.org/forum/viewforum.php?f=6&sid=2fe07761a72d4a04be4adf2c15734358

— FFH Mark

Our Facebook Page can be found at

http://www.facebook.com/pages/FreeFreeHand/189928967687005

Our Facebook Group can be found at

http://www.facebook.com/home.php?sk=group_173466076022350

Our (personal) Facebook presence is

http://www.facebook.com/freefreehand

We ask you to participate in the 2010 Free FreeHand Survey . It consists of 22 multiple-choice questions related to your use and expertise of both FreeHand and Illustrator. It will ask for your thoughts on Adobe’s policies and practices as regards ownership of both applications. It will also help determine where the efforts and resources of the Free FreeHand Organization should be placed going forward, as well as provide crucial statistical evidence for further research and actions.

The 2010 Free FreeHand Survey is online here: http://www.freefreehand.org/lime/index.php?sid=44172

Your identity will be completely anonymous other than your country of residence. Should you wish to, your name and contact information can be volunteered in the comment section at the end of the survey. You will also have the opportunity to voice any additional comments or concerns.

We strongly encourage you to participate in this 10 to 15 minute survey even if you have migrated to Illustrator from FreeHand. Your reasons for using Illustrator are as important as those of members still choosing to use FreeHand. The results of the survey will be posted on the Free FreeHand website in the weeks ahead.

Thank you for helping us save FreeHand!

sincerely yours,
Free FreeHand Organization

Those who continue to use FreeHand do so because it’s powerful and flexible, whilst at the same time being highly intuitive and innately stable. True, it’s not perfect, and it needs a little polish these days. But it has no major shortcomings that affect its ability to get the job done with the greatest of ease and efficiency. It’s also a real pleasure to use, and after almost six years since Adobe took it over and withdrew development, FreeHand’s loyal following is not about to give up on this product and it’s future.

Over that same period, Adobe’s Illustrator—the only real alternative to FreeHand—has been under constant development. Illustrator is now a feature-packed drawing application that includes a remarkable number of complex new features, including perspective grids, advanced typographic control, multiple pages, a real-time ‘draw inside’ feature that creates clipping paths as you draw, real-time and preset stroke width control, the automatic adjustment of dashed strokes to suit the geometry of their path, full Adobe PDF output capability, integration with other Adobe applications, and many more novel and excellent facilities.

Adobe has even tried to accommodate FreeHand users by promoting Illustrator’s ability to process files originally created in FreeHand. A sensible move, being that there must be an incalculable number of FreeHand files out there, either in use right now or sitting in designers’ archives waiting to be called upon at some stage in the future.

So why do we still hear so much about FreeHand after all these years?

There is no doubt that Illustrator has become a powerful beast. But could it be that these latest developments have come at a cost? Illustrator CS5 is being reported as painfully slow, and subject to frequent crashing (although Adobe has attempted to address the latter with a recent patch). And even though Adobe hails Illustrator CS5 as the first version able to access more than 2 GB RAM (now 3 to 4 GB, depending on system configuration), users of the new version are nevertheless reporting frequent out-of-memory failures as Illustrator announces all too often that “The operation cannot complete because there isn’t enough memory (RAM) available”. And of course, it no longer runs on PowerPC Macs. Furthermore, despite Adobe’s claims of cross-compatibility, Illustrator still has problems opening FreeHand files without compromising their integrity.

It also has to be said that some of Illustrator’s latest features—for example, the ability to paste objects inside other objects, multiple pages in one file, and perspective grids—were actually available in FreeHand, six years ago (and, of course, still are).

But, for many users (and certainly those who have any experience with FreeHand), it seems that the real bugbear with Illustrator is not merely speed, compatibility or even stability. It’s more to do with intuition. Just ‘using’ Illustrator has always had the potential to make you feel like you’re wading through quicksand wearing an overcoat and lead boots: you know where you want to get to, but the harder you try, the deeper you go, and the more you feel like it’s time to stop and wonder whether all the effort is really to your advantage. By which time, that spark of creative inspiration has long since faded.

I’ve known even die-hard Illustrator users find it difficult to deny that Illustrator can be fiddly at least, and desperately frustrating at worst, particularly when working with highly complex files. Unfortunately, this lack of a truly intuitive interface persists even with Illustrator CS5. The recent sound of frustration from within Adobe’s customer base, driven by the increasing complexity of many of Adobe’s products and an associated reduction in daily productivity, is something that cannot be ignored.

Yet, there is no doubt that, in the hands of the highly experienced user, Illustrator CS5 remains an immensely powerful application, albeit that it requires a considerable amount of computing power to make it feasible for daily use. And, in spite of its shortcomings, it is perfectly rational for long-standing Illustrator users to steadfastly support their application of choice not least because, with FreeHand held hostage in the basement for the past six years, they have had no viable alternative to consider. Of course, like FreeHand users, they too require access to the many pieces of work they have produced in Illustrator over the years. In this, they also have no choice and therein lies the point.

Both FreeHand and Illustrator have many excellent qualities. But the real question is not one of ‘which is best’—it’s actually a question of ‘what is my choice?’ Everyone has a right to choose their tools; and nobody should be given licence to take away that right purely for their own gain. Not even Adobe. And certainly not where, after six years of development, Illustrator still falls a long way short of being a viable, working alternative to FreeHand for the many thousands of FreeHand users continuing to earn their livelihoods in the ways they have already chosen.

Both FreeHand and Illustrator users were once able to exercise this right of choice. But by refusing to support FreeHand’s ongoing development, Adobe is denying that right from every party. Hence, Adobe’s recent “We Love Choice” marketing campaign is something of an irony in itself.

But of more significance to Adobe’s own future must be the degree of frustration with Adobe’s latest offerings; for if this persists, it may not be just the FreeHand lobbyists of today that will eventually be demanding the return of their right to choose, but a much larger audience indeed.

— Nigel Jones, Director, Words and Publications, Oxford, UK

Nigel Jones has been in publications design since 1986. His company, Words and Publications, was founded in 1989 to provide a complete design, illustration, editorial, layout and printing service which includes foreign language translation and production service; hence the ‘Words’ in ‘Words and Publications’.

In the beginning, his company was using Aldus’ PageMaker for all layout work. They were also evaluating FreeHand and Illustrator at that time, and it was with FreeHand that they developed a technique involving the painstaking separation of the black and second colour elements of each FreeHand diagram onto separate layers, exporting each layer as a separate EPS file, and then subsequently aligning the resulting EPS files on top of each other within the PageMaker layout. By doing this they could actually ‘force’ PageMaker to output all black and colour elements onto separated film positives.

Later, it was the combination of FreeHand and QuarkXPress that became invaluable to the firm in producing lengthy, full colour, highly illustrated documents, often of a technical nature. FreeHand still enables Words and Publications to work quickly and efficiently with very few drawbacks, some 20 years later. Words and Publications