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

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 …

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.