A Controlled Burn
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