Open at Adobe

The open source head line from Adobe today is:

Adobe Announces Open Source Technologies for Enterprise RIAs.

BlazeDS Enables Developers to Productively Build Real-Time Data-Driven Applications

Now there's a lot of technical stuff. Important stuff.  Things that will make the web a better place.

But I'm not the technical guru.  For that I'd invite you to check out the BlazeDS stuff on Adobe Labs.

No, I'm more interested in responding to a question that comes up all the time. In short, "Why doesn't Adobe just open source everything right now?"

Sorry, not going to happen. Even with the advantages to an open source model, no large established company can merely flip the switch.  And sometimes the switch doesn't want to be flipped.

Our focus for open source is targeted to developers.  Developers understand open source.  Coders are capable of dealing with vagarities in code. And developers provide the benefits of open source code.

Even then, the number of people who ever write a line of code is relatively small. Most people just want to something that works, first time every time. Designers in multimedia are similar. The cost of open fragmentation is directly and exponentially proportional to the testing and customer costs. If your web browser can't correctly display a web site, do you tend to blame the browser or the site author? Survey says?

Adobe will continue to work with open source, but it will be a controlled process. We've been pretty aggressive over the last year. We'll open up things as they make sense.  This isn't a "cliff launch"; we're trying to get  a pretty large entity airborne here. And a long runway is required.

So, keep talking to us and with us. Just don't expect elephants to act like hummingbirds

Posted by Dave McAllister at 08:29 AM | Permalink

Well, while it's not "done" done., the ballot on PDF for Draft International Standard (DIS) is in.  The ballot closed 2-Dec-2007, and the results are overwhelmingly in favor of approval for ISO 32000 PDF.  93% said yes, which is a clear indication of the importance of PDF throughout the world, and to the solid nature of the underlying PDF specification.

Now this was a lot of effort to pull together. We did follow a "lobby-free" policy with this effort.  We did answer concerns when we were asked to clarify.  We did log a few air miles when invited to discuss this in public forums. And we also took the PDF specification 1.7, removed any product dependencies, and created a world class draft standard. There was involvement in many groups within Adobe, engineering, products, marketing, legal, and the commitment from everyone to make this happen. And maybe a few of us lost some sleep over the last few days waiting for the result .

The next phase of standards is more difficult. Creating a formal standard from a good de facto standard used by thousands of independent products is, well, not easy, but straightforward. Creating a new standard, or moving a standard requires dedicated, knowledgeable people who can spend the time and energy to create a specification that enables movement  from the old and still keeps pace with use and technology. Finding those people is hard, getting their time is harder.

Adobe will work with ISO as it enters into the next phases of this standards process, and the company looks forward to collaborating with a global team that will continue to improve future ISO PDF standards. But Adobe is now just part of that global team.

So watch this space for updates... and I'm going to go catch a nap.

Posted by Dave McAllister at 04:40 AM | Permalink