Adobe needs vision
Some people have it all wrong!
I’m fairly certain that the ‘best tool for the job’ can be open-source and still be the best.
So why doesn’t Adobe open source their creative suite?
Stephen offers a good opinion here
UPDATE: mizmo’s got some things to say.
Here’s what i tried to post as a comment on Adobe’s busted moveable type installation
—————–
One of the many defining reasons I have now committed my career towards open source creative software was that it took less than half the time of learning the proprietary alternatives that I already knew.
Tell me, what else can open projects like Inkscape do to remove that fictitious barrier of ‘wasted time’ that is invested in learning a new creative tool.
Honestly I do not see it.
The only wasted time I see is bookshelves brimming with Adobe-related technical books. Those things have made an entire market around attempting to explain the non-intuitive quirks of many proprietary software offerings.
Free software most certainly expands someones creative potential and pushes creative works to entirely new audiences thanks to (but not limited to) the wide accessibility of software with no cost or platform dependency. Any idea how many clients I’ve been able to hand over the source files along with the software I used to create their assets with? I’ve lost count!
So what is it that helps you out more during a tight deadline with a client?
- Spending the time and money learning a mediocre proprietary work-flow that lets you down on feature X when you needed it yesterday ? (wait 6 months and hope you are part of a large audience for your vendor)
- Or can you download something intuitive, new and free that allows you to break new ground and puts you directly in contact with the people who actually created it.
By investing your time producing with any tool, be it a pencil or a piece of software, you are helping the manufacturers of that tool. The pencil manufacturers get more orders or the software makers see more attention put on their products.
With proprietary vs open source software you have a story of two vendors: one wants your money whereas the other is only happy you are using their work and would appreciate your feedback.I am happy to share the experience of using free software because I know I won’t have to pay later for a product built on my feedback, a product that I cannot change.
- Andy
————
Please revise your revenue model Adobe, nobody can live on bullshit forever. We’re not mushrooms.
To a user its not always about the price, its also about how its made and how its used. Free software offers less limitations.
August 22nd, 2007 at 4:36 am
For all the “avant garde” and “pushing the envelope” airs the design world likes to affect, those in the design world tend to be creatures of habit. As do their non-creative bosses. Their bosses would rather pay $600 for a well-known, industry standard application that guarantees the maximum interoperability with all their clients, than pay $0 for a spunky upstart that still has wrinkles to iron out.
The problem with Inkscape is that it isn’t as feature rich as Adobe yet, and some of the features it has aren’t quite at 100% reliability. Now, while interested programmers may see this as an opportunity, interested artists merely see this as a reason why they still have to buy Adobe, because it does things Inkscape doesn’t and they do not have the time to:
A) Learn to program, learn graphics programming, learn Inkscape’s classes so they can hook in new code.
or
B) Wait for a kindly programmer to agree that what they are requesting is needed, create it, add it to the source tree, get it accepted into the official project, make sure all the bugs are worked out and get it into the next stable release which might still be 6 months away. And then, if you’re on Mac, you’ll still get a partially crippled X11-based client that takes 20 seconds to open a document on average and can’t handle drag & drop.
And let’s be honest… Just getting a feature into a recent build isn’t enough, because the bleeding edge builds are crash-happy (in my experience) and it really sucks when you spend an hour on a design only to have the application crash on save. So I only use the official releases to minimize the chance of crashing.
Thus while Inkscape is a neat tool, it’s far from being an Adobe killer, and at the pace of Inkscape’s development, it’s going to be a few years before it’s ready to truly challenge Adobe Illustrator.
August 22nd, 2007 at 7:42 am
I could interpolate what was said by Greg, to apply to other free software.
Like GIMP. It is a great tool, but it still misses a lot on some places (like 16-bit imaging/HDR ¹/CMYK support, adjustment layers/layer effects… I could go on).
¹ Well, HDR/16-bit imaging code has existed for quite a while on CinePaint, so why couldn’t the GIMP project reuse some code from it?
August 22nd, 2007 at 8:58 am
G’day greg,
Thanks for your points, I’m glad to say alot of what you’ve addressed is in the immediate pipeline.
But really, I’ve never sat back and compared illustrator and inkscape. or scribus and indesign or gimp and photoshop. Why? because I can imagine Id use both for different solutions if Adobe were an open source company.
I cannot use both today because i do not trust my workflow to closed system that may depricate or “destructively extend” the features i depend on for my livelihood today.
And it’s not just the features we both have today, It’s the fundamentals of a closed model and how disruptive it can be to the entire design industry.
As a designer, I don’t want some sales guy to say they’ll pass my toolchain problems onto developers. They’ll only be concerned if my needs parallel a large enough market of demand.
My problem could even be a one-line fix that I may be willing to pay for, but how do I know? how can I influence the problems I have today?
Existing designers refusing to adopt free software is not a problem I have or even a goal I’ve set for myself. I’m not them, I’m me.
Closed minded proprietary software can keep their zombies of habit. Dinosaurs will die, what will the creative kids of tomorrow with real creative minds and genuine curiosity prefer?
and who says you cant have both ?
The broken logic that came out of the argument in the first link was that free software competes with Adobe. This has never been true. Adobe doesn’t even get to play on same field as the cool kids until it learns the rules.
August 22nd, 2007 at 3:22 pm
Well that’s a silly argument, that just because its closed and proprietary, its must be bad and untrustworthy. It’s just as bad as dismissing open-source software and development because its “designed by committee” (as one guy commented on the CNET story that linked to John’s article) and isn’t totally geared to making money.
I only have a problem with two things in his article:
1) that Adobe has such an obvious disdain/allergy for the FOSS development model (more so than MS, IMO), and is so arrogantly self-absorbed into their own business model accrued through years of being more or less the top dog in the graphics software industry.
2) that there’s no Red Hat of multimedia creation software, no company that is dedicated 100% to the promotion of open-format, open-standard multimedia, no company that can package a multimedia creation suite out of FOSS’s best software (Scribus, Inkscape, GIMP, CinePaint, a rebranded MediaWiki, etc).
That’s what gets my goat about the world of multimedia: that you just don’t have the diversity of choices that could be available in other, more accessible formats. The FOSS folks are always lagging behind in their delivery of open-standard formats (such as Ogg or Matroska, or CSS2.1, or SVG, and so on…), and the closed, proprietary companies have the money to jump ahead of each other and weave themselves (and their customers) into the legal webs of other companies and shadowy organizations and Not-Invented-Heres for short-term gains…and still not completely benefit the using customer (but still manage to terraform the web).
It’s just a stupid, stupid situation in which we’ve found ourselves.
August 23rd, 2007 at 1:13 pm
I did tell you about how I gave an old Adobe guy a demo of Inkscape at SIGGRAPH last year right? Hehehehehe
August 24th, 2007 at 4:53 pm
I probably don’t count as a creative type, but I needed to support a few people using Adobe PageMaker in a previous job. One thing I remember was that the software would occasionally screw up a save and not be able to open the file again. Furthermore, attempts to open the file would cause PageMaker to crash.
The suggested way fix the problem went something like this:
1. make sure you saved multiple copies with different names (too bad if you trusted the software to do the right thing …).
2. go back to the last save that can be opened successfully and doesn’t crash the app.
3. try to remember what you did after that point and redo that work.
4. if redoing the work causes the app to crash or not be able to save, try doing something else.
You can imagine how frustrating this is when the only way to do (1) is to go back to the nightly server backups …
January 28th, 2008 at 4:56 pm
Note: These are my own personal views and are NOT the views of my employer, Microsoft.
I’ve kept a close eye on which parts of Adobe are trickle into the Open Source stream and which parts they aren’t. Adobe is unlikely to even consider dropping their tools into the Open Source streams given that’s basically their main source of revenue. Their roadmap ahead is to build a UX Platform with server-side solutions to bootstrap into other sales areas.
They have basically many battlefronts to their position in the market; in that they have Microsoft (XAML + ecosystem), Apple (QuickTime + ecosystem) and Sun (j2EE vs Tomcat). That’s a fairly large amount of fires to keep putting out for a $3bn company. They broke the $3billion profit barrier this year, but that’s not going to happen year after year, as they can’t release CS3 every fiscal year.
Instead they have to keep fuelling the innovation harder, faster and more efficient and by trickling parts of the business into the open source streams (flex framework for example) this can be more of an asset but it also provides a good push back in terms of Open Source debates. As if the community does little or nothing with the Flex discussion, they can use that effectively as currency to state “well we tried our hand at it, but nothing took” – that or simply use it as a good “we do our part, how about that other guy ”.
It’s also when I think about it a bit more great bait for the Open Source communities to take. As once they get hooked on the parts that are in open waters, the tooling is going to be pretty limited. You could take the Open Source route and hope that the community pushes harder and faster to innovate but it will always come off second best to Adobe’s tools. Why? They have more money in their innovation war chest and the crux is that if the open source tools innovate beyond their initial ideas, they can then in turn use that against them (i.e. Flex Builder for example takes Eclipse and locks it down – license trickery aside).
I’ve got a friend on the CFEclipse route whom quit after “death by a thousand cuts” simply because consumers would download the solution, then complain about bugs. He’d respond with “well..you fix them, why the heck am I the only one…” which is a fair response really.
I personally back a lot of the Open Source projects and that’s purely because at heart I’m a technologist and it interests me yet I’d simply say that until Open Source tooling can become a ring fenced $1billion+ industry, corporations are going to use it as an ally more than an absolute demand.
Personally I think Open Source projects need to support one another a bit more, in that find the successes of today to help fuel the smaller ones tomorrow. As why make another CS3 or demand a CS3 suite become open sourced when what could be done is find parts that innovate beyond CS3 can offer.
In that focus more on the usage less on the features, as when you look at for example “Thermo” next upcoming add-on to the creative suite. This is a project which allows designers to spit out forms based around design. Ok, what project could overtake this tomorrow and that’s my overall point look beyond what you see today in CS3 and focus on what could be done tomorrow. Then you have a major corporation’s attention and hopefully can use that to gain sponsorship.
Flex Builder uses Eclipse, so something about the Eclipse space caught Macromedia’s eye at the time. That’s the war chest for Open source, finding that source of industry approval, as otherwise it’s just going to be yet another blog post complaining about lack of awareness around OS