On Friday, May 31, OIT will begin removing all Adobe and Microsoft Office licensed products from the NC State Virtual Computing Lab (VCL) environments due to changes in the vendors’ licensing models.
The Adobe and Microsoft licensing models now require a remote access license in addition to the product license. This means the university will have to purchase a second license to legally use the application remotely. At this time, the cost of purchasing the remote access license for either Microsoft Office or Adobe is not feasible due to budget constraints.
OIT is recommending open source alternatives where feasible.
Microsoft Office open source alternatives are:
Adobe open source alternative applications are available in the VCL environment, “Open Creative Suite Tools (Win7).” A partial list of alternatives includes:
- Dreamweaver: BlueGriffon Kompozer
- Photoshop: Paint.Net Gimp
- Acrobat PDFCreator
- Flash: Synfig
- Illustrator: Inkscape
- InDesign: Scribus
If you have additional questions or would like to request related open source tools, send an email to