The DOJ has approved Adobe’s the 3.4 billion dollar acquisition of Macromedia leaving European approval as the only hurdle to the transaction. What this means is that you can say goodbye to Macromedia’s Freehand and Adobe’s GoLive in favor of Illustrator and Dreamweaver respectively. Though the demise of Freehand will only be mourned by about eleven users in all, GoLive has carved a nice niche for itself. I suspect that the FUD seeded by Microsoft with its announced 2006 release of new web design and authoring tools to replace the almost forgotten FrontPage must have had something to do with this marriage. I also think that this consolidation and churn may open the door for more mature development and popularity of open source alternatives like Gimp.
More info on this story here…