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Why Adobe likes open source

Posted by Scott_Ruecker on · 13 comments
Heise; By Simon Bisson and Mary Branscombe 		Mail this story
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He’s the man who brought open source to Silicon Graphics and NEC and advisor to Warburg Pincus on how to make money investing in open source. "At one point I got the title of open source's undercover agent," recalls Dave McAllister. He was recruited by Adobe as Director of open source and standards with a specific mission: "I was hired to, a) start an open source process and, b) get PDF approved as an ISO standard." So: mission accomplished?

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Comments (13)

caitlyn ·
...why is almost all of their software closed and proprietary?
techiem2 ·
Just what I thought.
herzeleid ·
Baby steps... A huge corporation may find it too awkward to say "we're been wrong, we've been stupid" - give them time, they may yet surprise... Remember, a corporation is not a person, there are quite likely a number of factions at odd with each other on linux and on the whole open source issue. There have been some encouraging signs...
Sander_Marechal ·
Reading the article it seems like quite a few Adobe products are open source these days. Flex, ActionScript and a lot of other related technologies. But the key thing is that all these technologies revolve around Flash, which is still closed source.
moopst ·
Also some of their closed source stuff may be cross-licensed and they might not be able to simply open it up under a BSD or Mozilla license until they can get permission from some other entity. I give them credit for being a closed source software company that's moving towards the free and open world.
hkwint ·
Quoting:...why is almost all of their software closed and proprietary?


and apart from that, some of it doesn't run on 'open' operating systems, like CS.

Where I work, all of my colleague's next to me have CS, I don't (too expensive and beyond that I don't need it). Last week, I wanted to do edge detection of photos of two products I made, and show how the edges differed. I never did this before. I found out (Portable)Gimp can do it for free, and I was actually surprised I succeeded to plot these two edges - even in two different colors - within two hours or so!

It would be great for Adobe if CS(5?) would run on Linux, because otherwise people who use Linux like me will - sooner or later - find out they actually don't need most of CS.
Steven_Rosenber ·
Flash. Not open. If only HTML 5 would take care of it ...

I don't care what the video format is, but it needs to be free and open.
bigg ·
You run OpenBSD, so it matters more to you than most, because I doubt there will ever be a *BSD port.
Sander_Marechal ·
@Steven: HTML 5 will only take care of it if an open video format makes it into the standard. The biggest mistake the HTML crowd made is dropping the requirement for Ogg Theora from the standard.
hkwint ·
Quoting:The biggest mistake the HTML crowd made is dropping the requirement for Ogg Theora from the standard.


They were doing this for the benefits of the companies they're working for I guess.
hkwint ·
And so does Google (Chris diBona).
Sander_Marechal ·
Chris' remarks have been thoroughly debunked by the Theora developers.

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