Adobe's long-awaited release of a 64-bit version of Flash for Linux won the company praise and even a little advocacy in the Linux blogosphere last week. Writers touted the speed and robustness of the new Flash and told people to stop pirating Photoshop -- and use GIMP instead.

Over 12 months go I asked my readers whether open source software reduces your pirating and the result was very half-and-half. Well, this year I've asked the same question again and the results have shifted.

I’m no graphics professional, but like probably most of you, I do need to edit photos from time to time. I used Adobe Photoshop before since it is the most widely used image manipulating software. But when I started using Linux, things changed.

Canonical is looking into selling proprietary software like Adobe's Photoshop and Apple's iTunes within its distribution, Ubuntu. This would undoubtedly be helpful for certain end users wanting to switch to Linux, but is it good for free software in the long run?

Web designers, photographers and graphic designers loving the Adobe Photoshop Product family - a collection of graphics editing programs developed by Adobe Systems to create and edit images - should have a look at its open source alternative, GIMP.

Photoshop is the most well known and widely used graphics editing software out there - But it’s price tag prevents alot of people from using it.

Luckily, there are quite a few open source/free Photoshop Alternatives.

Adobe Acrobat was the first software to support Adobe Systems’ Portable Document Format (PDF). It is a family of software, some commercial and some free of charge. The Adobe Acrobat Reader program (now just called Adobe Reader) is available as a no-charge download from Adobe’s web site, and allows the viewing and printing of PDF files.

Open source software offers free alternatives to Adobe Photoshop and InDesign and Microsoft Office, and is worth a try before spending big money for the industry gold standards.

Now Adobe, which controls Flash and Flash Video, is trying to change that with the introduction of DRM restrictions in version 9 of its Flash Player and version 3 of its Flash Media Server software. Instead of an ordinary web download, these programs can use a proprietary, secret Adobe protocol to talk to each other, encrypting the communication and locking out non-Adobe software players and video tools. We imagine that Adobe has no illusions that this will stop copyright infringement -- any more than dozens of other DRM systems have done so -- but the introduction of encryption does give Adobe and its customers a powerful new legal weapon against competitors and ordinary users through the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).