Innovation vs anti innovation

Few things surprise me any more. But today, I experienced something that made me sick to my stomach. It mad me deeply sad with the state of the world. In one word. Adobe.

My company is a purveyor of fine innovative solutions to certain gov IT problems. We have found a simple way to deliver, encrypted, a pre-filled form that only the end user can open, complete and return (encrypted). It could enable us to deliver and put online large swathes of government transactions in an easy and convenient form which is ridiculously secure (see previous post).

We encrypt PDFs. We sold this to a gov dept. They love it. Then we hit a snag. In Adobe reader it will allow you to open the pdf and complete the form but Adobe have locked down the reader so that all you can do is print the form out. In theory, the PDF standard should allow you to just save the form pdf with the data entered and it would re encrypt with the original key and could be sent back.

But Adobe have locked that bit of functionality down so that you cannot save the form to send back. You can, if you either pay 360 pounds for an Adobe Acrobat license per end user receiving the form or purchase (at the sender end) a Adobe enterprise xyz server. Well just buy the license I hear you say! I would but for 2 reasons. They license is on a per user basis and although technically (according to Adobe) we would only need 1 user license unfortunately they only sell in a minimum of 1000 users. That sadly means that the license to do this is 45K pounds. But they offered a discount. Nice of them. 29k pounds. But, then they rang again and said there is 20% maintenance cost. Which is compulsory for 1 year.

Nice.

Luckily, where ever there is a greedy corporation trying to exploit people there is an innovator. We found another PDF reader that does allow you to save and send back encrypted. And its free (even for commercial use). So you would think that was that for Adobe.

But no. Gov comes to the rescue. Their clever people think that end users will have adobe reader and (although the reader is not a standard tool) that we should make it work with Adobe. At a cost of a minimum of an extra 65K pounds of tax payers money.

The good news is we have found a way to do it without PDFs involved at all. But only time will tell if Gov will wake up to the fact that this is pure profiteering by Adobe.

As I said, I felt sick to my stomach. I hang my head in shame that I belong to an industry where greedy corporations can needlessly lock down open standard tools in order to extract cash for no extra value. I hang my head further in shame in gov supporting such practices.