Keeping track of open initiatives at Adobe, from open source to open standards. Please note that opinions expressed within are mine and do not necessarily reflect those of Adobe.
Has the meaning of how we use “open” become diluted?
Way back in the day, when arguments about “Free Software” were around “free as in speech” or “free as in beer”., a new phrase was coined to avoid the issues around free. And thus Open Source was born.
Ever since then we’ve been seeing more activities attached to open. Off the top of my head I can think of:
Open Source
Open Standards
Open Specifications
Open Core
Open Ecosystem
Open API
Open Governance
Open Data
Open Code
Open Development
Free/Libre Open Source Software
Open Community
Open Roadmaps
Open Surface (my new personal pet peeve. Why would we need this?)
And I’m sure I missed many of them. (Feel free to add to the list in the comments).
There’s a great cartoon floating around the net somewhere. Two guys (circa Mad Men (early 60′s for the televison impaired)are talking. One says, “Just put Open Source in front of it. Trust me, I’m in PR”.
So, is there a clear meaning for open? Do we need a meaning, definition or measurement of open? Is open of and for the “community” or is it related to license, a copyright?
In the past I’ve been adverse to the idea of defining open (in the context we are discussing here). More recently, when I thought about it, while listening to a keynote at OSCON, I decided that the term had become meaningless.
Now, I’m undecided.
If we have a meaning, then we can measure the way companies and communities approach openness. And that can aid in leveraging openness within those companies. Atfer all, no one likes to lose.
So, what do you assume when you see “Open [fill-in-the-blank]? Let me know.
According to a LinuxInsider article, Adobe is whiplashing the world in resurrecting Flash Player on Linux.
Actually, while it went quiet for a while, it was never dead. In fact, the website pointed out that it would be back, once Adobe got caught up with the various bits needed for 64b support.
Adobe launched the 64b Labs preview in July. An update went live in August.
And so far, the response from the Linux community has demonstrated their interest.
As of last week, Linux downloads were in second place, behind Windows. This is great for those of us within Adobe working to extend Linux support. Without obvious indications that there is a market and demand, it is hard to agitate for continued support.
Perhaps the confusion is that Adobe AIR for Linux reached EOL a couple of months ago, thus causing all this angst.
Way back in 1999 I predicted a significant market for desktop Linux by 2005. (I was targeting better than Mac OS type numbers, in the 10-15% range.) It was clear back then that Linux had found a substantial adoption as a server OS, and it seemed only time before the desktop adoption rivaled at least “the other desktop”.
Obviously I was wrong.
This is the current market share for Linux from Netmarketshare, who provide great insight into global market share of web technologies. While its never quite safe to read into statistics, I believe there is a correlation between shares of browser usage and desktop operating systems. It’s likely these days that desktop users are browsing the internet; it’s also likely that such activity is not reflective of server operating systems.
Now, let’s take a look at two other OS shares:
Obviously the trend line in both of these cases is climbing. Adobe has certainly noticed it, our customers and partners have noticed it, and I’d bet that if you write or sell software, you’ve noticed it. The market is shifting to a mobile client, increasingly focused on the delivery of rich experiences and applications that travel with us via phone or tablet.
So we, Adobe, also need to shift with the market. We need to focus our resources on the rapidly expanding markets like Android. we need to focus our resources on efforts around emerging web technologies as they become open standards. We are beginning to focus on delviering more open capabilities in technologies that will expand those markets, like jQuery (see jQuery blog and Adobe Edge newsletter) and CSS Regions (news on cnet and on Adobe Labs).
So, with Desktop Linux, we see a basically flat growth curve hovering around 1%. And since the release of AIR, we’ve seen only a 0.5% download share for desktop Linux.
For Android and IOS we see substantial growth in share, and see predictions that indicate that in the Mobile OS market, the Android share could be 46%, with iOS at 16% (IDC March 2011).
So, with the 2.7 release of AIR, we made a decision to prioritize our resources towards a Linux porting kit for AIR, which our Open Screen Project partners can use to complete implementations of AIR for Linux-based platforms. As such, we will be focusing on supporting partner implementations and will no longer be releasing our own versions of Adobe AIR and the AIR SDK for desktop Linux.
But, to quote Jeffrey Hammond of Forrester, “There are already 100M Linux devices, it just so happens they’re running Android.”
This move will allow us to focus our platforms on the future of Linux clients – on mobile devices. Improving performance, expanding capabilities, cross-device compatibility, stability are things we think are necessary to drive the new Linux market.
And the new Linux client is where we and our customers and partners are focused.
There are a number of useful sources of information on the web that can help make a decision for a company to adopt open source (either directly as in to use, or in extension as in to enhance). There are a number that help lead through the release of technology through an open source license. I’ve created a number of such lists for companies over the years and while the primary questions always seem to focus on legal issues, the range of questions is much broader.
Usually they focus on the self publication of such technology.
However, there is also the practice of moving technology to an outside organization. It seems that the list of such organization/foundations is constantly growing, and that each offers certain focus or advantages. Apache, Eclipse, Mozilla, Linux Foundation all immediately come to mind when I think of such foundations that provide active efforts and governance for multiple projects, either unrelated or semi-related. I’m sure that you have your favorite as well; feel free to tell me about them in the comments.
But if there is a process for deciding the release the code in the first place, there should be a similar list that targets outside organization contributions. I spent some time thinking of the things I’d look for and came with the following ten. And I expect there are potentially dozens more that could dig ever deeper into this question.
Note these are in no particular order.
Does the target organization have a solid record of delivering on new technologies, particularly new contributions?
Does the organization offer a start up process for new projects?
Do they have a consistent and acceptable set of governance policies and procedures?
Is there clear indication that the organization itself is stable and well funded?
Do we already have experience with the organization?
Does the organization have expertise in projects that relates to our offering?
Does the organization itself offer projects or technologies that compete with our offering?
Is the organization itself open and consensus driven? How does one (individual/company) join?
Does the organization provide the capability for the project to live on should the donator stop active contributions?
Does the organization require assignment of copyright or other intellectual property to the organization?
I like to hear your ideas around choosing what foundations make sense for projects. Leave me a comment with your question to add to the list.
It was a great group of folks who got together on March 18th to listen and talk with Adobe on open source technologies and activities. The weather outside may have been less than stellar, but the discussions inside were brilliant.
(We used the twitter tag #OAA, just in case you feel like sneaking a peak back).
The day was split into three parts. First a discussion on Adobes own technology releases and projects that are now underway. Second, a view of the world from outside of Adobe, with speakers from Geeknet (Sourceforge), Mozilla and 10gen.
It was great to be able to kick this event off with a brief overview of all the various technologies we have launched in the past few years. As an example, here’s a timeline:
Pre-2006
Adobe Source Libraries: portable C++ libraries leveraging C++ Standard Library and Boost
2006
Tamarin: Actionscript virtual machine
Adobe Media Gallery: Allows creation of Flash Galleries
2007
Flex SDK: Compiler, debugger, frameworks, & language for Flash
Flex-AJAX Bridge: Allowing AJAX to work with Flex
XMP SDK: “e Extensible Metadata Platform
BlazeDS: Remoting and messaging services
Tamarin-Tracing: Designed for mobile devices
2008
FlexUnit: testing for Flex and Actionscript
Cairngorm: Micro-architecture for Rich Internet Applications
2009
EPUBGen: a Java library that demonstrates EPUB generation
Durango: a framework to build Adobe® AIR™ applications that can be customized by end-users
OSMF: pluggable components to create high-quality, full-featured playback experiences
TLF: Advanced, easy-to-integrate text layout features for innovative typography
Facebook Actionscript API: Allows integration between Facebook and Flash
Flex 4: Update to Flex SDK
FlexUnit: Unit testing framework for Flex and Actionscript 3
2010
AGL & AGLFN Adobe Glyph List: maps glyphs to Unicode
Adobe Open Source Data Sets: publically available test data sets
Adobe Panoramas Dataset: Image sets for evaluation of
CMap Resources: resources to map character codes
Kenten Generic OpenType Font: glyphs suitable for typesetting marks
Mapping Resources for PDF: Resources to derive content from PDF
Strobe Media Playback: OSMF-based media player
Tin: C++ code library for manipulating fonts
Manjobi: application to allow analysis on information on SCMs
FlexPMD : Audits Actionscript 3 or Flex source and identifies bad practices
All of the technologies and information can be found on the Open@Adobe portal under projects.
Of course, we also support external activities, such as Eclipse, jQuery, SQLite, Apache. In fact, we know of at least 31 Apache projects that Adobe employees have contributed to.
Our final part of the day was a series of questions to the attendees. Each group discussed a couple of questions, then the summary was presented to the larger group. Some great concepts came out, and we hope to expand on that work as we continue to develop open source within adobe.
This is the first of a series of “Open@Adobe: Outside In” events. Our next one is in San Francisco in June, and we’d like to invite you to help plan the event.
One of our questions was “What would you like to see Adobe cover in the next event? We got some great feedback from the attendees, but here’s your chance to weigh in as well. Just click to respond to the poll.
