Slashdot Mirror
Adobe CEO on Open Source
Reeses writes "ZDNet has an interview with John Warnock, CEO of Adobe, and has his impressions of Open Source software, and what Adobe plans on doing with it. "
Assorted childish jabs at Quark, the laughable proposition that they
really should be in the portal business, and assorted comments on
the Open Source movement. All in all, a very amusing piece worth a read- it gets better half way in.
Wish this bozo would stop gassing and get on with a Linux port....
Here is how adobe is obviously viewing open source:
"When we're too lazy to develop our own code, we'll get suckers from the open source movement to do it for us."
Adobe doesn't give a rip about open source.
It looks like their webserver is running on Solaris.
ZDNet: "Is it a Quark-killer?"
/hear/ the hyphen? :-)
Warnock: "If people use it, they will prefer it."
ZDNet: "Is it a Quark killer?"
Warnock: "Yes, I think over time it is."
Is there some magic in the hyphenation? And how do you
Or is this just ZDNet's way to show how creative they are?
"Some people who have this utopian view that everything should be free don't understand the necessity for governments or corporations. ... To embrace open source, they have to have the economic foundation to do that. They need to improve their understanding of basic economics."
ac.uk
If there is a problem with slashdot, it is too many 6 year old belly achers who don't realize that you don't have to read and comment on EVERY article...
I see three comments that show people are thinking about the exchange that ought to go on with open source. Clearly, Warnock's use of the term ``open source'' paralells Al Gore's: ``Gimme dat, you geek!''
To Adobe: you will get nothing from me until you show me a good reason why I ought to help you.
That's very nice of him to say that.
They appreciate Open Source, because then people will do the job for them.
God, I'm eager to do their job and not be paid while they make money of it.
Did you happen to read the part where they said that they paid $90,000 to have some Open Source developed? I'm going to be looking into this seriously as a way for me to enter the Open Source community. If you don't want to, fine by me. It just means that much less competition.
If I want to work on an Open Source Image Manipulation Program, I'll work on the Gimp.
That's a fine thing to do, too. But don't kid yourself into thinking that the Gimp is anywhere near ready to replace Photoshop. It's not. Not by a long shot.
I've seen a tool around called pdf2ps (or maybe pdftops?). It's definitely included with RH5.2, but I don't know what package it's a part of. Pretty sure it works.
(1.) I don't user portals, never have, never have needed to, and hopefully never will. I open my browsers *blank*. So does my mom and she isn't exactly the most technical user out there. They waste my time when I already know where I want to go.
(2.) Photoshop is too complex to need help from the OSS community? Damn, maybe that's because they didn't program very effectively when they made it and they've been kludging things together since its inception. Or, maybe he just wants to keep away from OSS without offending it.
(3.) Why does everyone pretend like their only choices are WinNT and Linux. Sun's OSes have been a perfectly viable options for years. And guess what! corporate execs can get support for it. The move to Linux is a recognition of a better OS paradigm (UNIX is scalable, modular, remotely accessible, etc.), not an ultimatum because Bill Gates pissed you off because he makes too much money or manages to grab the market more so than others.
He fed everyone another line of bull. I don't care that Adobe wants to keep PhotoShop proprietary and charge for it. Just admit why you do it though.
Trying to schnooker me into thinking you're open-minded about anything is just a slap in the face.
That's a rather silly statement. I might as well state that cheddar cheese is a million years behind NASA in space-station building.
Yours, Mr. A.C.
From the very beginning, Adobe has had some of the nastiest monopolistic, obstructionist policies WRT open development of any kind. Their business model is to create a "standard", get everybody to use it while keeping it proprietary where it counts, then tighten the screws and extort as much money as possible.
As I recall, the only reason they released specs on level-1 postscript fonts to *anyone* is that the industry was moving en masse to Truetype because of Adobe's refusal.
As far as I can tell, they're trying to do the same with PDF and other widely used "standards" they've created. If the only way they can keep their stock prices up is to abuse developers like this, they deserve to go bankrupt.
So, I'm not surprised that Adobe completely fails to get open-source. Their entire corporate mindset is more or less opposed to it.
I might be wrong about this, but didn't the people behind Ghostscript produce a DPS implementation? I know that code was available as part of the OpenStep project.
At least they are giving the reader away. When they first released it (~1995), you had to buy the damn reader software just to view IRS tax forms.
Actually, some sevice bureaus (like the one I worked at) dislike .ps work. Why? Its a closed box! If something's screwed up, we can't touch it.
.ps is the compiled code*, the file is the source.
For the programmers in the audience, a
* Technically it's postscript source, but editing it is generally not feasible.
Although I don't agree with taking potshots at competing companies, the Quark "buyout" was never realistic or even close to feasible, even when Adobe's stock price was way down. Quark is a much smaller company, bringing in something close to a quarter of the annual revenue of Adobe -- how do you suppose they would have found the funding to make such a purchase?
there have been petitions, there have been public flamings. As an adobe shareholder, I even considered going to there shareholder meeting, but had to work that day or something.
Considering this month's linux journal article on linux in pre-press (and that this is Adobe's core market) I would hope that somebody at that swanky palace in San jose wakes up REAL SOON NOW. Who doesn't want Photoshop, Distiller, and Frame (for starters) ported to a cheap, stable unix platform? The mac is great for pre-press it is just criminally slow and crash-happy.
As somebody who has pirated Photoshop for the last 10 years, I say port it and I'll finally buy it. No joke. It would be cool if it didn't cost 600 bux tho.
Maybe Adobe is just too mac/win based to fully support GNOME/gtk programming. I know they use that wanker bullshit Lattitude emulation layer to go over to sun, I suspect they do some kind of hokey hack to get ot SGI as well. If I'm wrong, (and do correct me if you know), and they are native on SGI/SUN for photoshop, there is no reason not to port to linux from an existing codebase point-of-view.
Why they just don't take over and put in a PostScript3 level into X (as previously suggested) I do now know.
To paraphrase: "I used to think CMYK color was useless for most people, until I read a book about how useful it is for professionals"
in short, if you use PDF to "layout" your website, I will assume it's not worth my time to visit...those things are just too big to be used that way
That's an easy one.
Can't wait to hear from all the undergrads who can't manage a lemon-aid stand to chime in describing how a guy who has built a mutli-billion dollar business is a moron because he hasn't embraced open-source.
This guy realy needs a reality check. I'm sure he
means well, but as has been pointed out you can't
just tell the OSS community to develop your
commercial applications for you.
First off, any software Adobe produces that they
give away free should obviously be Open Sourced.
Prime candidate is the Acrobat reader code. They
don't sell it, or make any money out of it
whatsoever. In fact, it pays them to have
Acrobat Reader ported to as many platforms and
be as functional as possible. If Adobe had made
the slightest effort to even think about OSS,
then Acrobat reader should have been Open Sourced
years ago.
Another candidate is Print Gear. I can understand
that they want to keep the printer side
interpreter as private code as this is what they
sell, but again it pays them to have Print Gear
drivers for as many platforms and applications
as possible. Thus widening the market for print
Gear printers. I accept though that this does
hold commercial risks, but I realy can't see anyone reverse engineering the Print Gear printer
side software. There's no commercial case for
bothering. Having said that, Ghostscript did it
for postscript. Has GS killed Adobe's PS proffits?
Nope. Has it expanded the potential market for
commewrcial PS products, licensed from Adobe?
I know from my experience it has. We've bought
PS printers specificaly to support GS systems.
For adobe to take advantage of the OSS community
they need to realise that this is a two way
deal. There has to be something in it for the
OSS community and the user base in general too,
not just Adobe's share holders.
Simon Hibbs
It's nice to hear somebody mention Gimps lack of CMYK color without getting all rabid, like it makes Gimp totally useless. Everytime I hear that argument, I think about how many people _don't_ need CMYK. The cat in the article himself said 93% of web graphics use Photoshop. He also neglected to mention that a vast portion of amateur webmasters have _pirated_ copies of Photoshop.
As far as the vector graphics goes, try xfig. Its a stock item on any distro I ever used.
For people like yourself who _need_ CMYK and Pantone, yes, you are shit outta luck, but you are most likely using a Mac anyway (best tool for the job and all). If graphics are your bread and butter, its not such a big deal to spend $500 on software because it'll pay for itself. The majority of people, however would be paying $500 for a feature they will never use.
And if anybody say "But Gimp has no line tool fer crap sake!", the bezier tool does that.
Perhaps I'm just strange, but I have a problem trusting products whose names begin with "kill."
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
After looking at the name further, it bears a striking resemblance to "kill us traitor!" Perhaps it's a subliminal message from the developers, and they removed the "i" from "traitor" to diguise it.
You never know.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Of course, if you're primarily doing graphics for a living, you're better off sticking with your Mac for that, as I don't imagine there will be Pantone support in any Free Unix anytime soon.
--
With regards to NT vs Linux to serve Adobe's "portal":
"I want to pay for an operating system from a vendor with a contractual relationship that gives me recourse if things go wrong,"
If you want to blame Microsoft, buy NT, but how much tech support does that really get anyone?
:)
If you want it to work, set up Linux. If you want to blame someone, buy it from a vendor. Who loses here?
Oh yeah, and... standard disclaimer: if you *really* want to put *four* ethernet cards in one machine to serve *static* web pages to more users than will *ever* visit your web site, then get Microsoft to setup NT for you. At least for now.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
OTOH, a good build process is essential to an Open Source product. If it's difficult to build, you won't have many users.
If Adobe want to join the open source movement, the obvious places to start would be infrastructure code; technologies, languages, libraries. And the obvious first target in Adobe's case would be PostScript, or parts thereof.
Think about it; if they released a basic Display PostScript implementation (or the code necessary to immediately integrate Ghostscript into XFree86), X users on Linux (and the BSDs) would immediately have access to Display PostScript. The DPS imaging model, being free, would become part of the environment, whose existence could be assumed by any developer. This would ensure the success of Adobe's model of imaging on X, and if Adobe did it first, there'd be less incentive for OSS developers to get involved in rival companies' models.
And if an (open-source) PostScript-based system becomes the de facto standard, that would give Adobe an advantage in porting their applications, which presumably share the same philosophy more closely.
If a general-purpose PostScript library (or set of libraries, for the imaging model, the language, and so forth) were released, perhaps under a similar licence to Netscape's JavaScript, it would definitely find a home in many projects.
Adobe would stand to lose very little; PostScript itself is a fairly old technology, and while coding an implementation is laborious (due to its size), it is not exactly secret-weapon material.
The standards game is not about intellectual property, but about memes; about getting your memes into the ideosphere, and helping them spread as far and wide as possible. Open-source technologies make far more fecund memes than equivalent proprietary, or semi-proprietary, ones; distibutable, usable code helps them spread like wildfire. And an open-source PostScript kit would make PostScript a killer meme, and quite probably the standard in its fields. Which would be good news for PostScript and good news for Adobe's related technologies.
I'm not sure what to make of the article; there's not much substance to it.
I do know that Adobe will not port Acrobat 4 (the full package, distiller, etc) to Unix. There is a small chance that a Solaris port might appear, but only if Sun pays Adobe for it.
Adobe's idea for open source might have been revealed at a recent seminar in London. In it, Adobe representatives suggested that they'd be expecting people to license a 'standard' PDF generation library from Adobe, as they were concerned that it's possible to write a PDF that conforms to the specification in the manual, but that won't work with Adobe PDF tools. (For examples of this, apparently pdfTeX produces math output that occasionally won't render in Acrobat Reader 4.)
So they've basically conceded in public that PDF isn't the cure-all to the problems of bad PostScript. They might try to license their PDF generation library under some mutant community licence to get other people to do the hard work of porting the code, and Adobe to control the returns. Nice work if you can get it.
This post is back up from -1. Why was it scored down?
Random words and phrases running around my head:
--
Fuck the system? Nah, you might catch something.
Yep. You heard it here first. Linux is used at Adobe. Actually, they've had at least a few linux servers for a couple years, although I have No Idea how extensive things are now. Any AC's want to chime in?
BTW: that "500 jobs" thing he mentioned included mine. Ouch. No hard feelings though, nice severance package. Start-ups can be a Good Thing, even when they're "Start-overs".
Maybe now they'll port some of their server-side Acrobat code. *HINT HINT*
--PDF Guy
--Mark
Suppose that you do have occasion to bring a warranty claim. Is Microsoft (or Dell) obliged to fix the problem? Heck no:
I can't see where Warnock can really claim to have any substantive recourse with commercial software; AFAIK few if any OS vendors offer any better warranty than does Microsoft.So in what way is the recourse with Linux any worse? If he acquires Linux over the net, at no charge, he has exactly the same option of getting a refund of the full price he paid for it, or a fix if the developers or community provide one. Exactly the same situation with MS, where MS gets to choose whether to refund the purchase price or provide a fix. MS's choice, not Warnock's. And even if he buys a commercially packaged Linux distribution, there are several that he can choose that offer a money-back guarantee.
The "contractual obligation of vendor" and "legal recourse" claims are widely cited as a problem with Free Software (or Open Source software, or ...), but these claims are entirely without merit. It's a FUD tactic, plain and simple, and it's very disingeneous of Warnock to repeat such nonsense.
Be careful not to misinterpret what he's saying. He's saying that it's not feasible for them to make their own messy code public. He is not saying that it's not feasible to write a program like that.
I can relate to him. I do design work on a great program that has an ugly build interface. You must spend a lot of time getting to know it before you can be productive.
What's so hard about typing:
make UNIX_CAN_BUILD_STATIC=0
?
-- Dirt Road
-- Dirt Road
Improvise - Adapt - Overcome (unofficial USMC motto)
ZDNet: Is InDesign a Quark Killer?
Warnock: Well, maybe.
ZDNet: Is InDesign a Quark Killer?
Warnock: I said, maybe.
ZDNet: Is InDesign a Quark Killer?
Warnock: Yes.
ZDNet: Is InDesign a Quark Killer?
Warnock: I just said, yes.
ZDNet: Is InDesign a Quark Killer?
Warnock: Will you stop asking me that?
...
What was the deal there, or am I just crazy?
ZOMG I WOULD LOVE TO KNOW ABOUT YOUR FEELINGS ON MACINTOSH VERSUS WINDOWS, VI VERSUS EMACS, AND HOW YOU'RE NOT A DORK
I think open sourcing this would be a good start if they were serious about open source; there are lots of useful, new applications of Adobe's PDF protocol that that would enable.
The response was disappointing. Even though they said they weren't making any money on PDF readers, the stated that it was very unlikely that they would open source it. They also seemed fairly bearish on the outlook of the company as a whole.
We should be fairly happy that Adobe at least publishes reasonably usable PostScript and PDF specifications eventually. Unless they have a big change of heart (or get taken over), I don't see a lot more coming out of that company.
There is a beta available of the Gimp for Win32.
http://www.gimp.org/~tml/gimp/win32/
The latest snapshot is dated 19990726. This has been a very stable release for me. I guess it needs a little more publicity. Zach!
Brian
"Would we put up the source code for Photoshop?" Warnock said. "Not in a million years. ... Well, maybe sometime in the future. But something like that is so horrendously complex, it is just not feasible -- the build mechanics are just too horrendous. But sure, if we needed help and the open-source community could provide it, absolutely."
That's very nice of him to say that.
They appreciate Open Source, because then people will do the job for them.
God, I'm eager to do their job and not be paid while they make money of it.
If I want to work on an Open Source Image Manipulation Program, I'll work on the Gimp.
Besides that, I think a good strategy for them is to work with BeOS.
If Be declared themselves as the media OS, I'm sure they can use Adobe's products, and vice versa.
Currently they don't even have "Acrobat reader" for BeOS....
---
The day Microsoft makes something that doesn't suck,
---
I'm going to live forever, or die in the attempt.
I would assume that this is because the entire world downloads Acrobat Reader, but I don't see why anybody would want to have a "My Adobe" account. Why would they put world news up on a site like that? I mean, thousands of people going to the site to download acrobat and they're going to actually try to clog up the site with completely irrelevant information that makes it harder to navigate? Where's the logic in that?
And Adobe isn't really a consumer-oriented company, and won't be as long as its good programs are like $500. Maybe they're going to have a "graphics-artist-only portal".
As for GoLive being the preferred product on the Mac, I've gotta say that it really sucks. Maybe I have a bum copy or something, but I tried it out a couple of days ago and it saved every HTML file with 0 bytes. Even the crappy documentation files that came with the program: blank. Luckily I had backup copies...
rooooar
Since when does buying a piece of software from a company establish a contractual obligation to make the software work? Hasn't Mr. Warnock ever read a shrink wrap license? Good god!
Actions speak louder than words ....
:-)
SGI and IBM have demonstrated their belief in OpenSource by releasing quite sizeable pieces of code and/or APIs. If and when Adobe does the same, then they might have some street credibility, especially in getting the community to port stuff like pdf converters to smaller platforms.
By the way, despite people's attachment to GIMP as a toy, Adobe have quite a prescence among commercial professional typesetting/publishing hardware that will never be replicated by the hacker community in the immediate future. This automated desktop-to-printing press market is worth some serious bikkies and I doubt whether anyone commercial vendor is going to abandon this gold mine. A serious stoush between Xerox, Cannon, and the document/image specialists might cause a market ruckus before things get standardised (funny how each digital camera manufacturer is pushing their favourite image format).
The real question is whether postscript or pdf is an appropriate file format to store digital documents/images for the long-term. TeX is probably the closest equivalent (even still used in scientific publishing) but it is not really a typesetting language. I won't mention Word which seems to come out differently on different configurations and framemaker SGML is rather complex for the average joe. XML is a simplified version designed for Web publishing but does it have the same richness suitable for paper publishing? It would be nice to be able to retrieve and view documents 50 years down the track after PCs have been replaced by whatever gee-whiz vr hype that will be the marketing ploy of the decade.
One possibility is the Simple Document Format
(http://www.mincom.com/mtr/sdf/) which separates somewhat the content and the formatting engines but I'm sure there's better alternatives. Any suggestions?
LL
Man, childish is right. I think that rather than take potshots at another company, a little analysis of how it is that it became conceivable that Quark would buy out Adobe "with Adobe's own money" might be a better idea. I mean, from the sound of it, they got lucky that Quark botched the buyout, and otherwise it would be "Quark Photoshop" now.
Otherwise, I think this is basically a puff piece. Bleah-puff.
It seems to me that companies are thinking about opensource as a way to take a product and get rid of it. They say, "here opensource people we gave you this now fix it up for us," which just isn't good. They want us to act as free labor for them, so they can then repackae the work from the community and ship it as a product. They also want to just have us support everything. They are saying, "we don't need tech support now, the opensource people will take care of that." This is something that I feel should be stoped right now, we need to really examine companies when they are thinking about going opensource to see if they are just going to attempt to use us as cheap labor, or acutaly give something to the community and contribute in a meaningfull way.
;P)
(All spelling mistakes are mine alone, and no one elses
Ok, it's popular, but...
"On the Mac platform, GoLive is the preferred product.."
He meant to say "BBEdit" there. As long as GoLive continues to muck with the html, people will need BBEdit (or your favorite text editor) to clean it up.
Lets see a nice fat PDF document describing the PrintGear imaging model and network protocol so we can have cheap high quality printers for OpenSource systems. Until Adobe provides that information they are just a barrier to transition.
Would we put up the source code for Photoshop?" Warnock said. "Not in a million years. ... Well, maybe sometime in the future. But something like that is so horrendously complex, it is just not feasible...
Um, GIMP, anyone? TIFFany? As if open source developers are somehow too stupid to figure out a graphics program...besides, don'tcha think those very same developers could actually clean up the mess that Photoshop is?
"I think organizations like Quark, who are fiercely proprietary, will suffer at the hands of those who use open standards and invite help from the open source community."
Exactomundo, mon cher suit-o-rama. And not releasing the code of your products means you are just as proprietary as Quark.
"I want to pay for an operating system from a vendor with a contractual relationship that gives me recourse if things go wrong," Warnock said.
So...in other words, you believe open source is good, but not good enough for Adobe to actually use. Linux not good enough? Just because it's FREE? Besides, all you have to do is get Linux from Red Hat, SuSE, TurboLinux or whatever, and voila, you have someone to scream at. If you're desperate, maybe you can drop Linus a line on Usenet.
I have grown to despise Quark--way too expensive, and when was the last time we say a truly *significant* upgrade?--but Adobe just went down about 1000 notches on my scale.
If you're going to be proprietary, at least be honest about it. Don't try act like you're a big fan of open source...and then slam one of its crown jewels.
Ethelred
Everyone wants to be Ethelred. Even I want to be Ethelred.
Apperantly every company - however unrelated to web content is trying to jump on the portal bandwagon.
Those pesky "make us you homepage" buttons are everywhere. (including in a site of a router producing company!)
Well, buzz words like "portal" and "open source" allways do strange things to the commercial world.
Ballerinas have fins that you'll never find
I'm sorry, but I'm tired of hearing about Corporate Execs saying we will go open source and everything will be better.
Open Source is a community. You don't just say "here, go do this" and everyone jumps up and does your work. Its been mentioned before, that programmers like to program on things they enjoy. If Adobe opens its source for the benefit of others and not just for themselves then you might get help.
Open Source works best when you both produce the code and the support. Others will send you bugs (and maybe if you're lucky at patch as well) so you product becomes better quality. And as the prime resource for the product, you will also be the prime supporter companies will choose. Thus, making Open Source a money maker. You can also market your product as something that will ALWAYS be supported because it IS open.
Warnock looks like he's trying to pillage the Open Source community. I always welcome Companies into this community, but at least for the right reasons. I know they are out to make money, but they must give back as well.
Steven Rostedt
-- Nevermind
To conclude: yes, GIMP is pretty damn nifty. No, Adobe doesn't have all the clues about open source. But they are pretty good at what they do, and even if you never use photoshop, chances are you can still benefit from Adobe's work.
Seeing as Adobe is now located in the center of the universe (TM), the Fremont neighborhood of Seattle, you'd think they'd get with the locals and push Linux tools.
Will in Seattle
Will in Seattle
- Webdesign is not made with Quark and then converted to HTML. Webdesign is completely different from printdesign.
- For printdesign, we have PS.
Sure, Linux lacks professional layout tools.- FrameMaker. "If there's doc to be written, we wanna write it - but we won't port our most powerful documentation-creation platform to Linux."
- Acrobat. "We want everyone to use PDF. We've got Acrobat reader for every platform under the sun, but the only platform for which we support the creation of PDF is Windoze and Mac. (For Acrobat Capture, it's Windoze only). Run any kind of UNIX - proprietary or open-source - and wanna create PDF? Forget it!"
So, let me get this straight. "We support open source, but our authoring tools are only available on a few proprietary UNIX platforms, definitely not on Linux, and our notion of a cross-platform output format can be viewed on anything, but only created on a PC or Mac."If that's "supporting" open source, I think I prefer Bill Gates' way of supporting open source.
FrameMaker is great. I love it. I've used it daily on both a Sun box an an SGI. Why there, and not on a Windoze box? Because Frame has strong scripting and automation capabilities that make it the ideal doc-producing platform in a UNIX environment. (Ironically, these capabilites are largely lacking in the Windoze version of Frame.)
PDF is great. I'd love to be able to publish in it. I'd love to extend my Frame production scripts to produce stuff in PDF as well as PostScript. But hey, I've only got a lowly UNIX box, not one of those spiffy NT things that can create PDF.
Wake up, Adobe. If you really want your products used "wherever something needs to be documented", port your products to Linux. I'd have a had much easier time convincing my employers to spring for FrameMaker if I could have told him it ran on a white-box PC running Linux, rather than a Sun workstation. Telling them that in addition to the pricey workstation, they also need a white-box PC running Windoze in order for me to generate PDF doesn't help.
Now why is it that all these companies seem to have these shitty build processes and not the standard (at least GNU standard :-) ./configure ; make ; make install.
Wouldn't they benefit from a simpler build process themselves?
This warnock guy openly admits that Photoshop build process is shite! I feel deep down that I should not have any respect for a product who's build process is shite :P
Most of the opensource software I use seem to have a very good/simple build process and documentation. In fact the only time I have run into some weirdness was with abiword, and with QT, and both are corporate stuff.
Now. I probably could built those If I spent some more time on them, but I was put off initially and decided to not use any more time fiddling with them.
I am not trying to say negative about abiword here, I like abiword from what I have seen off it but it seemed the build process was "nonstandard", I may offcourse also remember incorrectly.
Russian Roulette? while