Adobe's coming license manager

The Gripe Line: It's not been widely reported, but neither is it secret that Adobe, in the fall of next year, will no longer give customers the choice to 'opt out' of using Acrobat 8's Adobe License Manager, a.k.a. ALM. Ed Foster sees this move raising a number of questions, such as whether or not corporate customers really want to have to deal with vendor-specific license control systems? "Cynics might suggest that the prospect of the ALM becoming mandatory next year could spur corporate customers to adopt Acrobat 8 more quickly than they might otherwise, just so they can get the software without ALM embedded," he explains in The Adobe License Manager and Acrobat.

Columnists' corner: While open source has a significant number of programmers backing it, contributing code and choosing to use it, very few fields other than coders have come to the party. "Graphic artists and designers, in particular, seem resistant to the idea of community collaboration," writes Neil McAllister in Graphic eye for the open source guy. "And yet, today's GUI applications need these kinds of contributions almost as much as they need the program code underneath."

The news beat: Oracle releases Virtual PBX, a J2EE-based platform on which developers can build new telecom services. Skype aims for the enterprise with a beta version upgrading its Internet telephony system that will be available within weeks and enable systems administrators to tap Windows management tools to set how Skype connects to the Internet. And Klir Analytics unveiled today a beta of its IT management product for publishing and sharing favorite fixes.

Best of the blogs: The characteristics that make up winning athletes can also be found in successful business executives, and the open source realm is no exception. At least four attributes can span both worlds, Matt Asay points out in this post. Two open source execs strike him as excellent examples.

Posted by Tom Sullivan on September 25, 2006 10:48 AM