Proprietary software woes

I am attending the EGEE User Forum congress I have mentioned before, and we just had a talk delayed 5 minutes because of some stupid software problem.

The speaker had his talk in [[PDF]] format, really standard and portable. The organizers provided him with a Windows machine, with Acrobat Pro installed (apparently). He tried to open the file with it, but it turns out the license for Acrobat had expired, so the computer refused to open the file. How horribly full of shit is that? There are thousands of free (and/or freeware) programs out there to read PDFs, so why was the poor speaker forced to use another computer just for the task? This would have never happened, obviously, had the organizers been using free software.

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