Open at Adobe

At the recent Internet World conference in London, Nitot of Mozilla made several remarks that included Adobe as an threat to the open nature of the internet.

Needless to say to those who watch the space, some of Nitot’s comments don’t reflect reality. I’d like to take a moment to clarify issues about Adobe Flash Player Adobe support for Linux, and Adobe open efforts.

Adobe delivered Flash Player 7 for Linux back in 2004. Flash Player 9 for Linux is now available and in 2007 Adobe committed to release future versions of Flash Player Linux simultaneously with Windows and Macintosh. I have Flash Player on my Macintosh OSX 10.5, Ubuntu 8.04, and Windows XP. Go here to see the version you have for yourself (http://kb.adobe.com/selfservice/viewContent.do?externalId=tn_15507)

My version shows 9.0.124.0 on all of them. While I didn't test it, I'm told you can also add Solaris to that list as well.

It’s true we aren’t able to support every single Linux distribution and we know that Linux users want Flash Player for 64b Linux. But Adobe works hard to support the most popular distributions for Flash Player (and Adobe Reader) just as we do with the other operating systems.

Adobe may not deliver all of our software as open source but we firmly believe in the power of the open web. Flash Player isn’t open source. But Adobe, with a group of industry partners just announced the Open Screen Project. As our part of the project, Adobe removed all restrictions on using the file format that drives the Flash technologies, SWF and FLV/F4V. With the release of AMF in February along with BlazeDS, and an upcoming release of Flash Cast, Adobe is equally committed to making sure the web, at least our part, stays open.

Other open activities from Adobe include contributing the ActionScript Virtual Machine as open source to Mozilla’s Tamarin project. This is the same open source AVM in Flash Player 9 and Adobe AIR. Adobe is actively engaged in the Tamarin project. Providing Flex -- a free open source framework for building RIAs, which includes the source to the ActionScript components from the Flex SDK, the Java source code for the ActionScript and MXML compilers, and the ActionScript debugger from the SDK. Additionally, other major portions of Adobe AIR, such as Webkit (the HTML engine) and SQLite for the local database functionality are open source today.

The power of the web is found in its global reach, open exchange and access to all. Adobe recognizes that the extended web, reaching from devices to desktops needs to be equally open and as such is removing barriers that will enable content creation, applications and access to spread widely.

Posted by Dave McAllister at 10:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

SWF,AMF,Flash (R) Player(TM),Adobe

Today, May 1st, Adobe and a number of industry leaders is kicking off the Open Screen Project.

"So what is this Opens Screen Project of which you speak", whispers the web?

Well, let's set some context.

There's a challenge today across the industry that affects just about everyone. On desktops, there's a consistent runtime for content and rich applications, called the Flash Player (and increasingly for applications, Adobe AIR). But the web is not just desktops anymore, the extended web spreads from phones to MIDs to Settops, consumer electronics, and desktops.

So, together with a pretty influencial group of industry leaders (see website for details), Adobe is kicking off the  Open Screen Project, designed to create a consistent runtime environment that removes barriers for delivery of content and applications to everything from mobile phones to desktops.

This project kicks off today, and while it will be a continual thing, Adobe is making some significant announcements as part of the project.

First, Adobe is removing all use restrictions on the SWF specification. While SWF (the binary file format for playback) formerly had a license agreement that limited use of the specification, it's now gone. And BTW, the same applies to FLV/F4V, the streaming format. This is effective immediately.

Second, we will be publishing the port layer APIs for the Adobe Flash Player.  Not immediately, but "watch this space".  As we, working with the partners on the project create the consistent runtime, that porting layer will be made openly available to enable others to embed the technology easier.

Third, we're going to publish the data protocol specifications that drive Flash Cast as well. Expect to see that roll out over the next few months.

Fourth, with the first release of the runtime from the Open Screen Project, Adobe will remove all Adobe licensing fees from the Flash Player for devices.  (Yes, note the "for devices", the Flash Player has always been free for desktops).

(And don't forget the AMF specification, which we published in Feb 2008 as part of the BlazeDS open source initiative. It fits in here as well.)

So what does this all mean?

Well, it breaks down this way.  The power of the web is in its reach, open exchange and access. Adobe recognizes that the extended web, reaching from devices to desktops needs to be equally open and as such is removing a barrier that will enable content creation, applciations and access to spread widely. Similar to what we have seen with other open specifications, we expect that innovation and capabilities will appear that we ourselves would never get around to, or maybe even think of.

To us, this is a pretty major step. It's been worked on for a while now, and it's barely started. Since it's just underway, if you'd like more information, email the project at the Open Screen Project.

Ryan Stewart has a great blog on the impact of this.  Check out his insights!

So, since I can't say it near as well as our CTO, Kevin Lynch, drop over here and let Kevin tell you why this is important.

And let me know what you think..

Posted by Dave McAllister at 09:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

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

As you should know by now, Adobe released the Flex SDK off to open source. And now, you can get the Flex Builder on Linux.

Available on labs , this is the first release (Public Alpha) of a tool to let you build apps with Flex on and for Linux. It's not the full blown Flex Builder (yet) but we wanted to let you get an early look so you can tell us what you think and what you want.

So go get it, drop by the forums, and tell us what you think.

Posted by Dave McAllister at 04:27 PM | Permalink

open source,live chat,Q&A,Flex,Ajax,RIA,AIR

Tomorrow, Adobe is hosting a live chat session on topics relating to RIA. and I'm polishing up the claws (just kidding).

You know RIA, Rich Internet Applications?

We're going to be chatting and answering questions on topics around Adobe on AIR, Flex, AJAX, and even (ta-da!) open source by yours truely.  Well, I'm not going to answer the AIR, Flex, or Ajax stuff... we have really smart folks to do that.

But I'll be on hand to talk about openness at Adobe, and attempt to answer questions you might have. I won't claim to have all the answers, but just asking us questions could have an impact on wher Adobe goes in the open source world.

You'll be able to find the chat via a banner off the OSDN sites: Sourceforge and Slashdot.

or off Adobe at http://www.adobe.com/go/rialivechat.

The live Q&A session starts at a web browser near you at 4PM Eastern on September 18th, 2007 and runs till 6PM Eastern. So starting at 4AM Wednesday for China (Beijing), 5AM Wednesday for Japan (Tokyo), 10PM Tuesday for Germany (Berlin), 9PM for the UK (London), 6AM wednesday for Australia (Sydney), and so forth.

Anyway. I'm hoping to meet a bunch of you tomorrow and hear the questions you've got on RIA, AIR, Flex, Ajax, and especially on Open Source.

Posted by Dave McAllister at 08:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Ajax,Flex,Video,standards

Hopefully by now you know about Adobe and the open sourcing of Flex.

But do you know about Adobe and Ajax in both open source and in standards?

So, let me tell you.

First Adobe is a member of the Open Ajax Alliance, an an organization of leading vendors, open source projects, and companies using Ajax that are dedicated to the successful adoption of open and interoperable Ajax-based Web technologies.This is a very active, very committed and very, very open organization. Adobe is proud to be a member, and we take part in a number of different working groups and task forces.

In fact, we recently proposed a new task force, on searchability. Yeah, I know, you know how to search Ajax... right? Well, from the Task Force proposal:

While the impact of AJAX has been substantially expanded, the impact of the overall search ability of web sites may be adversely affected by the use of AJAX. Complex web sites built with content from an XML source are often essentially invisible to search engines. While suggestions for workarounds exist, no clear or sufficient methods exist within practices today.

We believe this is a significant lack within AJAX and would offer that OpenAjax is the appropriate venue to resolve this lack.

To accomplish this, we would propose the start of a task force to bring together the framework developers and the search engine companies to help identify which hooks are necessary and possible.  

The desired end goal would be that even in complex web sites which are built entirely using an AJAX framework with all of the data presented via asynchronous XML, there is still sufficient metadata/context available to search engines such that they can understand the content of the application AND provide deep linking into those applications.   The idea is to extend the AJAX frameworks so that they include the metadata necessary for search engines to understand the data that is flowing through an Ajax application as well as the context/state within an application that is associated with that data.

 The end product would be a set of best practice recommendation for frameworks that would be compatible with the major search engines or a set of recommendations to other working groups or task forces.

Now, as a standards wonk (and a cat), I'm not actually capable of groking this. But it seems that creating a dynamic web site based on my request (for catnip brownie recipes) might not be searchable, thus considering googling, it doesn't exist. I'm sure you have workarounds, but a standard way of making this searchable has to be good for the adoption of Ajax.

Continuing on the Ajax theme for a minute, are you aware that Adobe has things that can help you bridge technologies like Flash and Ajax? It's called the Flash-Ajax Video Component and is open source code.  Yep, open source. Free as in BSD license. FAVideo is a small, open source Flash component that you can use to provide video playback within an Ajax application. It exposes all of the formatting and video playback controls necessary to build a video player customized entirely using HTML and Javascript.

How about the Flex Ajax Bridge, part of the Flex SDK we open sourced under MPL? FABridge ) is a small, unobtrusive code library that you can insert into an Adobe® Flex™ application, a Flex component, or even an empty SWF file to expose it to scripting in the browser."

"To humbly borrow a page from the Ruby on Rails community, FABridge " is built with the “don’t repeat yourself” principle in mind. Rather than having to define new, simplified APIs to expose a graph of ActionScript objects to JavaScript, with FABridge you can make your ActionScript classes available to JavaScript without any additional coding. After you insert the library, essentially anything you can do with ActionScript, you can do with JavaScript."

Or Spry, a framework for Ajax. "The Spry framework for AJAX is a JavaScript library for web designers that provides functionality that allows designers to build pages that provide a richer experience for their users. It is designed to bring AJAX to the web design community who can benefit from AJAX, but are not well served other frameworks." It's also under the BSD license.

Anyway, I thought you'd like an insight into what Adobe is doing in openness around Ajax.

As always, comments (and cat treats) welcome.

Posted by Dave McAllister at 04:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

It's a nice simple lazy day. And I'm too darn comfortable to do  any actual heavy lifting.

So, I thought I'd point out a new blog from one of my Adobe colleagues, Jim King.

Jim is the PDF Architect for Adobe. He's also the principal technology lead for the effort to promote PDF as an ISO standard. He is articulate, has well thought out reasons and proposals, and is a nice guy. Well, given that he admits to coding a PDF document by hand, he's a nice guy <grin>.

Jim has started a blog to help keep you informed on the open efforts for ISO PDF. Note that I say "open" here. At Adobe, we recognize that buying your way into a standard is never a good thing, We'd rather have the best standard for the community needs, and Jim and his team have spent a lot of time working on what we submitted to ISO for consideration. We're already been told by experts outside of Adobe that this is the best PDF specification that has ever been produced.

Anyway, I want you to rush over and check out Jim's blog, Inside PDF right now. Now, or I'll shed on you.

And I'm going back to snoozing.

Posted by Dave McAllister at 01:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Well, Linuxworld San Francisco has come and gone.  I have to admit it wasn't the most exciting LWCE I've ever been to, but it is always nice seeing old friends and meeting new ones.

I also have to admit the coolness factor was several degrees off the  record.  While he was there, I'm told, I never managed to see Maddog. I did get to catch up with Russ Pavlicek (Cassatt), Robin (Roblimo) Miller (sourceforge) , and Adam Goodman (Linux Magazine).  I had a chance to talk James Gray and Jill Franklin of Linux Journal and express my wants to see some part of the culture of open source return to the "new, cool stuff". I had a chance to laugh with Patrick McConaughy (Avocent) and his oddball sense of humor.

I even got to teach a bit of Flex.

Yeah, me. (and wipe that smirk off your face!)

Adobe was part of a desktop Linux focus on the show floor.  Thanks to Dell, who provided the laptops (running Ubuntu, definitely drool-worthy), we had the open source components of Flex loaded up, and Flash as well. James Ward, Flex Evangelist, who built our quickie tutorial taught day 1. David Zuckerman, one of Adobe's Computer Scientists in Flex Engineering taught day 2.  And I taught day 3.

The concepts of Flex are easily gotten. The language is elegant. And the capabilities on Linux were amazing. But here, go see for yourself. The course materials are here.

Anyway, logistical difficulties aside, the course went fine.  People are always amazed at how easy, and powerful Flex is, and just how quick you can become proficient in it.

So, give it a try. Go get the bits you need from Flex.org or fire up one from here. And let me know what you think!

Let's see you at Max 2007:

Posted by Dave McAllister at 03:01 PM | Permalink

It seems amazing how many people are curious about the decision to release a (formerly) closed source project into open source. Even as we begin the transition efforts for Flex, by opening the bug base, andso on, we still get requestts for information on the "why" of Flex open source.

(What, you haven't registered for bug base access? Get ye hence now!)

Anyway, there is a really great interview with Adobe's Phil Costa, the Director of Product Management for Flex and ColdFusion over at "How Software is built".

Phil drills into our reasons to open Flex, and details some of our decision process and roadmap for the future. It's well worth reading, insightful and entertaining.

But lets expand a bit.

Four basic motivations exist for corporations getting into OSS.

• Revenue from selling a product or service that relies on OSS in some way.
• Reducing the cost of technology used.
• Providing a community benefit (knowledge, functionality that may not be commercial).
• Putting pressure on competitors.

Now obviously, this aren't the only reasons, nor are they necessarily the altrusitic reasons.  But they are motivating factors.

There are additional factors that are technology specific (which Phil does a great job of detailing). There are factors, as stated in an early blog, to return value for value received. There are desires to expand reach, find new and disruptive markets. But corporations, especially public ones, most often need find tangible values, and measure against those values.

Anyway, go read what is said about Flex. 

See us at MAX 2007!

Posted by Dave McAllister at 10:19 AM | Permalink

On Adobe's developer center, you'll find a little offering called XMP, The Adobe eXtensible Metadata Platform. This technology allows you to embed data about a file into the file itself.

However, the more interesting thing herein is that the SDK is open, downloadable and available for your use. In fact, XMP is used by a large number of industry standards for their own framework. One worth pointing out to the open source community is the Creative Commons organization. While not required, CC offers an XMP template for marking documents with license information.

But is it open?

Well, let's take a look at the download. Clicking on the download link leads us to the licensing agreement. It's BSD, about as open and friendly as possible.

While the earlier versions were quite open (under an Adobe open source license), the world really doesn't need YAOSL (yet another open source license). Moving to a BSD license allows you to use XMP as you desire, maybe in ways we haven't even thought of.

Anyway, if you haven't taken a look at XMP, nows a great time to start.

as always...

Posted by Dave McAllister at 12:10 PM | Permalink

Today, Adobe unveiled a major open source initiative.

In short, Adobe announced it will release Flex under the Mozilla Public License (MPL). So, in conjunction with Tamarin, Adobe has just made the next generation of web experiences an open experience.

Basically, Adobe has just changed the nature of the game for developing RIAs (Rich Internet Applications).

Here, go read the official stuff.

Now, to some, this might not be a big deal, but what you can do with Flex is nothing short of amazing. As a start, I’d suggest hopping over to Podtech and see what the excitement is about from the guys who know.

What I want to spend some time discussion is what this means from an open source perspective.

First, the choice of MPL. This choice was the best one to help remove the concerns of of our customers and other commercial vendors, while retaining the drive to release code changes as the modifications are distributed. It also pairs well into the Tamarin project, which was also released under an MPL license.

MPL allows the community to innovate freely, and that innovation will help bring Flex freely into new opportunities and new features.

Second, open source is only as good as who gets involved.

So how do you get involved? Well, there are a couple of ways to immediately start.

First, hop over to http://www.flex.org and make sure we know that you’re interested.

Second, sign up on the Google group http://groups.google.com/group/flex-open-source
to take part in the Flex discussion. We want to hear from you.

Third, go download the current Flex SDK from Adobe.

And Finally.

Let us hear from you. Open source is all about interactions and communications, so join in and speak up.

Posted by Dave McAllister at 08:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)