Productive/Creative – Analog Man in a Digital World
One of my most popular articles, “How To Install Adobe Air on Ubuntu 12.04” was hit by another bulk DMCA takedown. To say I’m unhappy is an understatement.
You can read more about it here.
Please, I urge you, don’t waste your time and money with Adobe products. There are plenty of free and/or affordable alternatives out there.
Five years ago, I posted an article here on how to install Adobe Air (the discontinued native Linux version) on Ubuntu 12.04.
Everything that I had written here I decided to pull, because Adobe likes to do massive bulk DMCA Takedowns without actually verifying whether the reported page actually violated anything. They simply did a text web search, and smote down everything that looked even remotely offensive. And as an added note: this isn’t the first time they’ve done this with this exact page.
I can no longer recommend trying to get any Adobe products working on your computer for any reason. I realize that this page has helped hundreds (if not more) people to get Adobe’s horrible (and non-supported) Air platform working in Linux, just to be able to use third-party apps. But as useful as it might have been, I just can’t in good conscience help anybody with it any more.
Adobe falsely accuses me of stealing their property and has my page forcibly removed from Google searches? Yeah, okay, there’s enough links out there that I still got some traffic. I felt good in knowing that I was helping people (or so I thought). So I left the content up, exactly as it was, knowing that I hadn’t violated anything, in hopes that some people would still find it.
Fast forward a year, and I’ve been hit by another DMCA takedown, again from Adobe, for the same exact page. It’s become obvious to me that instead of making products that people actually want to use, they’re focusing their attention on punishing users who they think might have remotely stepped out of line. Now they’ve filed a complaint against my AdSense account, and are taking money from my pockets- and I still haven’t done anything wrong. At no point have I ever offered any of Adobe’s products for download here.
Google is as complicit in this as Adobe- don’t think I’m letting them off the hook. I went through their extensive review process last time, and they basically told me “Tough luck, buddy. Sucks to be you.” I’ll have a few more articles about how to break free from the many-headed Hydra that is Google in the near future. Their time is coming, as well. They can rot as far as I’m concerned.
Adobe can bite me. I’m through with them, and you should be too. As is fitting with a blog called “Living Outside the Box,” Here’s a non-extensive list of alternatives to Adobe products:
I’m sorry if you came here looking for help with getting Air to run on Linux. I really wanted to help you, but Adobe had other plans.
Please, urge your third-party developers to move away from anything having to do with Adobe. You’ll be better off for it.