The problem is that it wasn't a cost of doing business last month. So if someone used what was an ordinary feature in their files, they can no longer open them in any usable manner-- apparently it maps everything to black.

Okay, Adobe and Pantone have decided to do a bold business decision that breaks existing files. That's their perogative. But in terms of minimizing bridge burning, their goal should be to fail tactfully and with as little lossage as possible. For a comparable, if you loaded a 12-bit-per-channel high-dynamic-range file in a software stack that only supported 8 bits per channel, the right answer is to discard the least significant bits, not just throw up your hands.

A more acceptable degradation would have been to say "the Pantone colours have been replaced with approximations matches in CMYK/RGB/whatever. If you save the file again, the Pantone data is stripped out."

> A more acceptable degradation would have been to say "the Pantone colours have been replaced with approximations matches in CMYK/RGB/whatever. If you save the file again, the Pantone data is stripped out."

I don't quite think Adobe would be allowed to do that though. If what Adobe was previously licensing on your behalf was the translations from Pantone codes to RGB/CMYK and the files saved with Pantone colors only have Pantone codes, then the best you could do is list the missing colors and ask the user to manually substitute in color choices from available color spaces for each missing color.