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The original was posted on /r/opensource by /u/HeihachiHibachi on 2024-04-02 17:23:14.

My soul is in disarray.

Why can’t we, as a world wide human collective, create a really good Adobe Acrobat free open source alternative?

I’ve tried some really good free closed source alternatives out there such as PDF24 and PDFgear, and even paid alternatives like nitroPDF and ABBY. They are all ok but not free nor open source.

My favorite so far is PDFgear. The dev is great, has a great website, is active on Reddit, etc., but there’s no way to support development for it. Whereas if it was open source, and people are able to support development for it and people get into it, I’m sure it would turn into an Acrobat killer app. It’s already almost there. If it was FOSS though it would be a killer app forever. Currently, it’s free, but being closed source alludes to it most likely being monetized in the future possibly.

How come there’s so many other great open source projects for all manner of software types, but nothing has been created to rival Acrobat?

The licensing cost for Acrobat is enormous and makes no sense. I’d rather spend money supporting an open source project where we can claw ourselves away from Adobe no matter how long it takes.

Is there currently worthy rival to Acrobat that is open source, either free or paid?