And this is how Adobe finally gained all FreeHand assets.īy the time Illustrator was already taking the market’s leading position. However Macromedia was absorbed by Adobe exactly 10 years later, with the merger announced in April 2005 and finalized in December 2005. FreeHand screenshot by Angelo La Barbera, CC BY SA The new owner continued the development of FreeHand and even lowered the price by $100. Later same year Altsys was acquired by Macromedia. The Federal Trade Commission then put a 10 years long moratorium on the acquisition, and all the rights went back to Altsys. Upon hearing about the merger plans, Altsys sued Aldus over “a prima facie violation of a non-compete clause within the FreeHand licensing agreement”. In 1988, Altsys created Virtuoso, a vector graphics editor which they licensed to Aldus, who released it under the name of FreeHand.Īdobe attempted to gain control over FreeHand in 1994 while acquiring Aldus. The story of Adobe’s strange affection for FreeHand goes way back, when Altsys was still around. But what do others do? In 2011 a group of passionate FreeHand users filed a lawsuite against Adobe and demanded the release of FreeHand’s source code. When a software vendor abandons one of its assets, many users move on.

Inkscape free hand file