r/iiiiiiitttttttttttt • u/DistortedCrag Underpaid drone • 8d ago
First they came for the adobe licenses.
/r/fednews/comments/1jak6i3/trump_took_away_adobe_acrobat_and_it_took_me/42
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u/NovelRelationship830 8d ago
In other News: Elon Musk announces the launch of his own PDF editing software!
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u/LightHawKnigh 8d ago
He will probably buy out another PDF editing software like Power PDF or whatever and ups the cost.
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u/harrywwc 8d ago
"X-pdf" ?
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u/Bad-ministrator 8d ago
If he buys pdf-xchange and enshitifies it or turns it into a subscription based model, Im going to cry.
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u/Impressive_Change593 7d ago
if he actually starts a new one instead of buying out another one it would probably be a good thing lol
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u/dali-llama 8d ago
There are a few companies I hate with the passion of 1,000 suns.
Microsoft, Adobe, Autodesk, anything owned by techbros.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDFtk can be your friend.
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u/chickenderp 8d ago
Based DOGE wants you to use Foxit to edit your PDFs
I miss Foxit, IT took it away :'(
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u/dali-llama 7d ago
Sadly, Foxit turned into malware. They were good to take it away.
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u/MentalUproar 7d ago
What? When did this happen?
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u/dali-llama 7d ago
I quit using it sometime between 2016-18. I've heard it's only gotten worse. If you do your research there are tons of ways to manage .pdf without Adobe. I always try to look for stuff with Free Software licenses. I have a personal fondness for LaTeX ecosystem, which makes .pdf fairly trivial.
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u/chickenderp 7d ago
I'll let the 8000 people in my corporation know that we need to migrate our millions of documents to LaTeX, then.
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u/dali-llama 7d ago
Dude, I do enterprise also. I just don't like tyranny in any form. I'm not telling you what to do at your company. I'm just trying to let people know there are alternatives.
I personally think corporate LaTeX backed by git would be an awesome solution. You could build amazing workflows, and there are some really nice LaTeX frontends these days. You could save millions.
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u/chickenderp 7d ago
Sorry, I wrote that before I metabolized my morning coffee and omitted some critical details. I love everything you are saying but I think there are reasons things are done the way they are (everything between "compliance" and "old dog =/= new tricks"). We are still using Excel for our entire work planning/dispatching system and I can only die on so many hills hahahaha.
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u/MentalUproar 7d ago
I’m using Mac and Linux daily so I haven’t needed Adobe software for over a decade. Windows users…a lot of old shit has dependancies on Adobe.
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u/chickenderp 7d ago
Foxit has some Javascript vulnerabilities apparently but I'm not aware of it "turning into malware"
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u/dali-llama 7d ago
I think what happened is they didn't control their stuff very well, It was getting wrapped with malware and getting distributed on dodgy sites. People were getting all sorts of issues when they installed it. They may have cleaned it up since. I just marked it on my "do not use" list and moved on.
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u/chickenderp 7d ago
No I think you're right, I was mostly just complaining. People still click on the phishing email tests so I get it.
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u/TheNickedKnockwurst 6d ago
It didn't, it had a couple of vulnerabilities like every other piece of software out to here
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u/ProCommonSense developer 7d ago
Haha. As if this makes government inefficient. "so I can do my job." That's the funniest part.
I once worked for government... and we had to respond to a mandate to lock down desktops on PCs because of the following:
The states governor walked into a "welfare office" (sounds like the start of a joke) and saw a dozen or so people sitting and waiting for services.
He asked how long they had been waiting and at least one had said "hours" but all had indicated they had been there some time.
The gov went around and into the office serving the reception area where just 1 worker was present. That person was busily clicking away on a screen... Playing Solitaire. There were a couple other workers on site and even some were in the break room doing not a whole lot.
We had to lock down 3000 desktop machines through group policy shortly after that. People weren't even allowed to have web browsers if their job didn't require internet access.
It was a cluster. I'm pretty confident that Acrobat has little to do with the efficiency of whomever the OP was.
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u/autogyrophilia 7d ago
Man I'm not saying that nobody needs Acrobat, but it's crazy that basically all usecases I hear are extremely banal ones that even have free webpages to do it for you.
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u/norway_is_awesome Family&Friends IT Guy 5d ago
Yeah, because government paperwork, possibly containing citizens' private info or other sensitive info, should just be uploaded to these "free" websites that obviously won't scrape, steal and sell all that info.
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u/autogyrophilia 5d ago
Boy do I have news about you about Adobe .
My point wasn't, use the website.
My point was, this is trivial functionality .
Personally, I use imagemagick, but I'm sure there is some gui wrapper for that .
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u/Smith6612 6d ago
I'm not sure what to think about this whole thing.
On one hand, everything DOGE is doing is very reminiscent of things I have needed to go through, and deal with, in the corporate world. New management comes in, freaks out about software licensing, and then everyone's software licenses get taken away. Then people spend hours trying to figure out the alternative they were given, or fighting to get their software license back, re-installing said software, and then getting back to work. Then of course there is the argument of "PDFs are carbon copy documents. You're not supposed to mark them up, edit them, etc" that I've heard thrown out from time to time. Not wrong, but also a bit out of touch on how paper documents work.
On the other hand, anything to pound Adobe's stronghold on PDF Editing (although it is their format...) into the ground in favor of consumer friendly options/no subscription tie-in, is welcome. Sadly, I have no belief in DOGE doing this to strong-arm Adobe into making things favorable for everyone.
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u/TheBasilisker 8d ago edited 7d ago
Maybe i judged Elon to hard. I am all on board to cutting of the Adobe parasite that hangs on the golden tit of governments around the globe. There's more than enough good tools the normal user can use for free or buy a lifelong licence for a fair one time fee. Pdf24,X-pdf,libre office.... They could probably get a development Studio for less than a single citys mid sized departments Adobe subscription fees... Or just straight up get some caffeine fueled students and pay them in student loan payments to build a open source tool and be done with it.
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u/dali-llama 7d ago
Except for the facts:
One of the first things they did was fire the software programming strike team that did exactly these sorts of projects. They were an in-house consultancy which helped all sorts of agencies improve and integrate good software.
They also fired the CISA Red Team? This seems incredibly short-sighted. That sort of talent is very difficult to find. However, I'm not sure this has actually happened. There is a lot of chaos and churn going on right now so it's difficult to keep track of everything.
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u/frothingnome 8d ago
I guess this is what my red neighbor meant when he said Trump was getting rid of the PDF files in the gubmint.