Adobe Unveils Open Source Library

anamexis writes "Adobe premiered (no pun intended) opensource.adobe.com recently. The first two libraries available, titled Adam and Eve, respectively, take on complex GUI issues in applications. They are written in C++ and have been released under the MIT License, an OSI-Approved Open Source License."

Comments

Re:The GIMP

[1010011010]

Too Lazy? It's one of the shortest licenses known to man:

The MIT License

Copyright (c)

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

So, YES, Gimp could use the Adobe UI, as long as it includes the "obnoxious advertising clause".

uhoh

[justforaday]

Combine these with an Apple and you have the downfall of mankind...

Re:The GIMP

[Homology]

Too Lazy? It's one of the shortest licenses known to man:

The OpenBSD license is even shorter :

Below is an example license to be used for new code in OpenBSD,
modeled after the ISC license.

It is important to specify the year of the copyright. Additional years
should be separated by a comma, e.g.
Copyright (c) 2003, 2004

If you add extra text to the body of the license, be careful not to
add further restrictions.

/*
* Copyright (c) CCYY YOUR NAME HERE <user@your.dom.ain>
*
* Permission to use, copy, modify, and distribute this software for any
* purpose with or without fee is hereby granted, provided that the above
* copyright notice and this permission notice appear in all copies.
*
* THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS" AND THE AUTHOR DISCLAIMS ALL WARRANTIES
* WITH REGARD TO THIS SOFTWARE INCLUDING ALL IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF
* MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHOR BE LIABLE FOR
* ANY SPECIAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES OR ANY DAMAGES
* WHATSOEVER RESULTING FROM LOSS OF USE, DATA OR PROFITS, WHETHER IN AN
* ACTION OF CONTRACT, NEGLIGENCE OR OTHER TORTIOUS ACTION, ARISING OUT OF
* OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE USE OR PERFORMANCE OF THIS SOFTWARE.
*/

Re:Acrobat Reader

[PoprocksCk]

You're right, it is less bloated. But the point is that they're still using some ugly, closed-source GUI library, and that they fully neglected Linux users for one whole major version.

Sure, they announced a 'beta' of version 7 for Linux, but has anyone ever *seen* it? They cancelled the public beta after a few days. So it's not so much that the product is a poor one (version 5.0.10 is pretty decent, really) but that they see Linux as a tier-2, unimportant platform. I truly hope that that changes in the near future as Adobe begins to embrace OSS.

Sounds like an ambitious undertaking

[TeeJS]

From the article: (referring to Adam) "The code providing this functionality accounts for a third of Adobe's code base and nearly half of the bugs found during development."

combined with: "The Eve layout engine has already saved Adobe millions of dollars in localization costs."

Means this contibution (mainly UI work based on Boost) is a very decent contibution.

Re:Acrobat Reader

[uss_valiant]

A friend uses acroread 7 (beta) on his solaris (or was it linux) machine and it's really good. I'm also very pleased with the reader in version 7 on windows. It's so much better, faster, more responsive, ... than version 6. It's probably as fast as version 5 with more features than version 6.
After the disastrous version 6, Adobe fixed the issues with version 7 and I can honestly recommend using the most recent Acrobat Reader version again.

Sorry, I'm an idiot. Readable version here.

[Gorath99]

From the documentation:

Adam is a modeling engine and declarative language for describing constraints and relationships on a collection of value, typically the parameters to an application command. When bound to a human interface (HI) Adam provides the logic that controls the HI behavior. Adam is similar in concept to a spreadsheet or a forms manager. Values are set and dependent values are recalculated. Adam provides facilities to resolve interrelated dependencies and to track those dependencies, beyond what a spreadsheet provides.

Eve consists of a declarative language and layout engine for constructing an HI. The layout engine in Eve takes into account a rich description of UI elements to achieve a high quality layout - rivaling what can be achieved with manual placement. A single HI description in Eve suffices for multiple OS platforms and languages. This document describes Eve2, the latest version of Eve. Eve2 was developed to work with Adam and to incorporate many improvements that have been requested since Eve1 was written.

I must admit that I haven't looked at the code in great detail, but that doesn't sound very trivial to me. Also, 1749K of zip compressed C++ code would be a heck of a lot of trivial code.

Re:Acrobat Reader

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

they see Linux as a tier-2, unimportant platform

In my experience Adobe views everything that isn't Windows as a tier-2 platform, and would like nothing more than for them to go away. They have killed or frozen many products for Linux, Mac OS, and Solaris in the last few years. One particularly galling example is Framemaker. It is the single most popular application for writing manuals and technical publications, due to it's unique feature-set (developed before adobe bought it). Adobe killed the Linux version completely, and never released an OS X native version. Mac OS 9 users made up 65% of their customers, but for some reason when OS X came out, everyone stopped buying the Mac version. (everyone was waiting for an OS X version). It never came. Now it is a Window's only product. I know a number of people who run it in the Classic OS 9 emulation environment and a number who have switched to alternate products. Other users just switched to Windows. This is typical Adobe's attitude in recent years. Even with their flagship, Photoshop, Mac versions have sometimes lagged behind, or been missing features of the windows release. It is all just symptomatic of a company that has bought into Windows development, and only supports other platforms when there is just too much money coming in. Adobe has lost my trust, and I think lost it's way. I'm just waiting for a real competitor to appear.