Coming up for the Adobe MAX conference, I'm hosting two talks and one Birds of a Feather on open source.
The talks are:
Mixing Open Source and Commercial Software
BlazeDS, the Adobe Flex SDK, and Tamarin reflect the continued extension of Adobe technology into open source. Understanding how to incorporate open source code with commercial software is becoming increasingly important. Learn about open source initiatives within Adobe and how they may affect organizations like yours.
Why Open Source, and What Makes the Cut?
Adopting open source technology and releasing technology as open source are important strategic decisions for any company. Learn why your company may benefit from these steps and when they make sense. Hear a panel discussion on Adobe's strategic vision for open source, learn what it means for your organization, and take the opportunity to ask questions and offer recommendations.
The last one is probably the most interesting. Joining me for a Q&A panel are Dave Story (Adobe VP, Product Development), Matt Asay (VP & GM, Alfresco), David Wadhwani (VP and GM , Adobe Platform Business). (I still need to check if the intrpid Ryan Stewart is still joining us.)
Now, like any good panel, the content is driven by the questions. And I'm sure you all have questions.
So, if you have questions that you'd like to put into the list for this panel (a section of which will be "Questions from the 'Net"), then leave them in comments. I won't promise we get to all of them., I won't agree to ask insulting or trivial questions. I will make sure that a valid and reasonable representation of your questions get asked, ad I'll post answers here after the event.
So, give it your best shot, and make them good questions.
Why is the Flash Player not being open sourced?
Arguments like ‘that way there will be too many implementations out there’ are not valid in my opinion, Sun used to say exactly the same about the Java runtime and then they decided to make it open source under a GPL license. I’d be interested in the answer, because I’m 99% sure in a few years time it will become open source and that’s when it will be interesting to refer back to the arguments you give today and realize it should’ve been open source all along.
How does Adobe give back to the open source projects it leverages in it's commercial products? For example ColdFusion makes use of several open source libraries such as Apache Axis, Apache POI, iText, YUI, and extJS just to name a few. I know Macromedia was heavily involved in the development of Axis, but I haven't seen the same level of involvement in external open source projects from Adobe. Obviously Adobe is under no legal obligation to contribute back to these projects, but if Adobe is reselling these libraries as new features do they have any moral obligation?
Great Question. I'll que it up for the panel. However, it's worth noting that at least for Axis, Tom Jordahl is a founding member of the Apache Web Service Project (which Axis comes from) and continues to be active. We also devote resources, funds and/or code to several others, like FCKeditor, iText, CFEclipse, jPedal.
We do tend to be quiet about our involvement. We believe that actions speak louder, but as you point out (and I'm trying to accomplish) it's time for Adobe to speak out!
Not sure if this falls in the scope of the Q&A and whether or not it's a question that will be addressed elsewhere at MAX, but I was wondering if there was any updates on the direction of ActionScript, with relation to what's happened this past summer with the ECMAScript 3.1 and "Harmony"? A lot of questions have already been asked and answered on this blog when the issue first came up, but I figured with Flash Player 10 out now, that likely planning has begun on Flash Player 11 and that perhaps some decisions might have been made with regarding ActionScript.
Thanks.
It's one the list. I'll have an update after MAX.
What about an open sourced IDE like Flex Builder ?
I think it's realy important to have a free, and open sourced IDE like java developpers have.
Did any of these questions get answered or even asked?
Here is one question I'd like to be mentioned on the panel:
Amongst Open Source projects, there are all sorts of "political visions". Some see an Open Source project as a "democracy", involving the community, listening to developers and users on the field. Others view it as an "enlightened dictatorship" where very few people maintain the cohesion of the vision of the product and seem to say to the community "look, we're already offering you the software for free, don't expect us to lose control of its evolution". When I saw Adobe launch opensource.adobe.com and bugs.adobe.com, I really thought you were going for the first one. But now that I see some of the top voted issues on bugs.adobe.com simply deferred, I'm starting to wonder. I understand both policies, I would just like to know what is Adobe's vision on that issue? How do you take feedback? How do you integrate the community in your work?
By the way, I'll be there at your session on Wednesday. I'll be glad to have the opportunity to discuss those issues with you. So see you there.