Should Adobe Embrace Open Source?

We all use Adobe products, usually on a daily basis. Doc's a big fan of PDF, which gives everyone the option of having well-designed documents. But is Adobe behind the times when it comes to support for Open Source operating systems such as Linux? That's the conclusion of "The VAR Guy," a writer Doc's been paying more and more attention to.

Here's some of what The VAR Guy has to say:

As Adobe faces increasingly stiff competition on different fronts, one might think the company would be eager to reach the broadest base of end-users possible.  Yet its record of engagement within the open source channel remains lackluster at best.  Let's take a look at Adobe's trends on this front, and what they might mean over the long-term.

Things are not what they once were for Adobe.  There was a time when Flash's hegemony on the Web was virtually unchallenged.  It was also once common to hear people refer to PDF documents as "Adobe files," signaling the ubiquity of Adobe Reader.

Now, times have changed.  The HTML5 video tag and other technological changes mean that Flash, though still widely popular, is no longer the only option for embedding videos in Web pages, and there are plenty of alternatives to Adobe Reader out there, many of them free and much lighter on system resources than Adobe's offering.

Doc's having a hard time juggling the positive aspects of Open Source with tried-and-true capitalism. He suspects Adobe is, too.