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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.
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 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
- 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.