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.

Comments

Re:Give me a break.

[Gleef]

Samael asks:

Why should [Adobe] care about Open Source?

Because if they don't care enough to at least understand it, they're going to have trouble making money. I don't think all companies need to drop everything and switch to Free Software immediately, but I think the companies who keep blinders on, who show as little comprehension of the issues as Adobe, are doomed to failure.

Adobe has two cash cows, PhotoShop and PageMaker (to a lesser extent, Illustrator). There's already serious Free Software competition for one of them, and various people are starting up projects to compete with the other.

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Re:KIllustrator

[Trepidity]

Perhaps I'm just strange, but I have a problem trusting products whose names begin with "kill."

Re:KIllustrator

[Trepidity]

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.

KIllustrator

[Brian Knotts]

Regarding vector drawing programs, just FYI: in addition to xfig, there is also KIllustrator, which is up to version 0.7, and will be part of the KDE 2.0/KOffice release.

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.

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Re:KIllustrator

[Brian Knotts]

I noticed that after I posted it, but had never really noticed it before. Of course, for those who are unfamiliar, it is part of the KDE project: i.e., "K"-"Illustrator." :-)

BTW. someone else in this thread suggested that I had obviously never used FreeHand or Illustrator. Actually, I have used both. And I wasn't saying that KIllustrator is a plug-in replacement for either of those two programs. It clearly isn't ready for use by graphics professionals (keep in mind, though, that most people aren't graphics professionals; I can assure you I'm not). But I will say that for version 0.7 of a free software project, it has the potential to become such a replacement eventually.

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For clueless, see "PhotoShop marketing"

[Kurt Gray]

Sure go ahead and keep fighting Quark, in the meantime GIMP will be kicking your sorry asses to the gutter. I also suggest you keep on yanking the eval version of PhotoShop of your web site so newbie webmasters, God forbid, might actually use PhotoShop and get hooked on it -- wouldn't want that to happen. Oh yeah, and why not keep on selling PhotoShop $500 per license -- that's a great idea! Hell, we all have money to throw away, make it $1000! Bundle in more usueless tools with it too... that'll teach those Quark-heads!!

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,"

...OK. Just try holding Microsoft responsible when things go wrong. Go ahead, try it. Don't worry we'll still be here to help you get up in running iwth a real OS when the big bad Redmond giant laughs at you and tells you to stick it up your butt with a coconut.

Re:For clueless, see "PhotoShop marketing"

[jub]

GIMP is fine for web graphics, and a nicely evolving tool. BUT, print professionals will not take the GIMP seriously until it has some standardized color controls and some DTP equivalents to Quark or Pagemaker or Framemaker. Photoshop is only one part of the creative process for print work, and until you can use all the tools you need on one platform, the GIMP and other Linux tools will languish in the hands of those determined to use them, not the masses of creative professionals.

Another thing, GIMP is fine for pixel graphics, but there is nothing on Linux for vector art. The vast majority of my art creation (illustrations, schematics) are done in Freehand and sometimes Illustrator. Without those tools available on Linux, i'm staying with the Mac.

a third thing, it's not just creating graphics, it's getting them printed (still assuming print work here, which won't die in the face of web graphics, ya know), even if you get all 3 parts of print production on Linux (vector, pixel and layout tools), you need Linux-savvy service bureaus who can take thos wacky file formats and make them RIP like regular files.

oh, and the beautiful thing about pdf is that you can do ANY kind of layout work and make it a pdf. Take your average high-quality design and convert it to HTML and it'll look like your average drone with FrontPage did it. HTML was never meant for high quality work. A pdf can be used for the web, for print, for onscreen navigating, all within the same file. it's a beautiful, beautiful thing, and IMHO the best product Adobe's come up with since Postscript.

- jub, graphics professional, thank you very much.

Why Adobe should OS PostScript; a memetic view

[acb]

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.

Linux at Adobe

[Mark Storer]

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

don't hold your breath...

[jetson123]

I talked to Adobe representatives at JavaOne. They were showing a PDF reader written in Java.

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.

Re: see PrintGear spec first

[LL]

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

OpenSourcing - OutSourcing

[Q-bert][]

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.


(All spelling mistakes are mine alone, and no one elses ;P)

Golive for Mac...

[ravenskana]

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.

Adobe...get a life

[Ethelred Unraed]

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

Re:Adobe...get a life

[MarkCC]

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?

Let me throw in a little bit of reality, which a lot of people don't understand (and which I didn't believe until I was forcibly exposed to it!).

Software development in industry is more chaotic than you probably imagine. I work for one of the biggest software/hardware companies in the world. I was recently involved in a development project that cost millions of dollars to produce, and consisted of over 1 million lines of code. The company invested years of development effort into this system - it was a high profile, highly important product to us.

At one point, I needed to build a modified version of the product. I grabbed the full source code, and attempted to build it. I couldn't. I enlisted the help of local experts. They couldn't make it build. We enlisted the help of the team in charge of product builds. They could build it *in their own environment*, *on their own machiens* - but they had *no clue* of how to build it elsewhere, or what the environment dependencies that affected the build were.

There is *no one* in the company who understands the entire build process. There's a group of guys who each understand small pieces of it, and they've cobbled together a combination of lots of little makefiles bound together by kludgy perl scripts.

I'll bet that Photoshop is very much the same way. I'll bet that no one at Adobe has the slightest clue of how to build the entire system.

So. If Photoshop were ever opensourced, it would disappear in the blink of an eye, because no one would be able to build it. Would open-source hackers really spends months of effort fixing a fundamentally broken build process on a proprietary project, when they could invest their time doing useful things to an opensource competitor like GIMP? I really don't think so.

This is not what Open Source is for.

[nevets]

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.

lighten up on Adobe

[ubermuffin]

I've seen plenty of anti-adobe posts in response to this article. Why are they getting so much flak? I understand that they may be a bit naïve about the open source community, and that GIMP is a wonderful standin for Photoshop, but here are a few things to consider:

• For those of us who are forced to use Windows in the workplace, Photoshop is just about the best tool there is for graphics, with pretty good tech support, and it's becoming more extensible and scriptable with each release. That's a good thing. GIMP may be great for those who have access to Linux, but the truth is not everyone does. Photoshop (and Illustrator) represent solid reliable tools for plenty of folks, and that should inspire some respect for Adobe.
  
  
• Adobe is actually putting money into the open source community for implementing XSL, which is a standard that will be helpful not just for Adobe, but for everyone who uses XML (read: the whole web community in the near-ish future). While they may be driving a standard that they will embrace, they certainly won't control it, and I'd say the overall effect for the online community will be positive.
  
  
• Adobe, while maybe unfamiliar with the open source culture, has put forth a lot of effort in developing open (and non-open) industry standards. Postscript is as good an example as any of such a standard -- and free tools like ghostscript are available for sharing information between folks. Check out the SVG (scalable vector graphics) specification at the W3C, you'll see that a couple of the authors of the document come from Adobe. Standards like SVG and Postscript are good for industry because they prevent people like Microsoft and Macromedia from sneaking in and making their own propriatary standards.
  

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.

Linux at Adobe? I just want Adobe on Linux!

[Tackhead]

Let's see here...

• 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.