[discuss] Adobe to donate script code to Mozilla

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On Tuesday 07 November 2006 18:19, Evan Leibovitch wrote:
> Russell McOrmond wrote:
> > I am wondering if anyone is closer to this development team and has
> > more details.  I find this surprising given Adobe hasn't historically
> > been any more happy with FLOSS than Microsoft has been.
>
> True, but IT vendors have probably concluded that the FOSS crowd can
> often be reliably counted on to help confront Microsoft. With MS wanting
> to develop its own SWF and PDF clones, and all the wrangling over PDF
> support in MS-Office, Adobe probably recognizes its vulnerability in
> this and related fields, and is looking at the FOSS community as an
> enemy-of-my-enemy ally.

what i've gathered from my discussions with them is that they see FOSS, where 
they do find it fitting in with their goals, as a straight out improvement to 
their deliverables and potentially a door to new markets.

in my last email i forgot to also mention their contribution of the "adam and 
eve" framework which is the cross-platform gui abstraction system they use in 
photoshop (among others). their motivation was pretty straight forward on 
this, and the community has created backends that target various toolkits.

> This isn't true across the board -- I have no idea to what extent the
> Gimp threatens Photoshop. 

at this point in time, the threat is near zero. perhaps with the move to GEGL 
at some future point and as Krita becomes more capable (doing so at a 
remarkable pace, i might add =) ....

> However, I see some interesting parallels to 
> how Real Networks seemed to suddenly embrace openness after a long time
> fighting it.

a difference between Real then and Adobe now would probably be the market 
position and financial soundness  of each.

> IMO, expect to see Adobe be very selective in its embrace 
> of open technology.

agreed.

> > Is this the missing piece to complete an Open Source Flash Player? The
> > lack of a complete FLOSS Flash player has been a problem, especially
> > with the lack of developer time given to the proprietary Linux player.
>
> Well, the SWF format is AFAIK open and unencumbered, 

SWF is not flash. the file format is shared by Adobe (though not an "open 
standard" per say) but that doesn't cover the content stored within it, such 
as what binary blobs their authoring tools put in an SWF format file.

> If the format is open but developers don't care to support it well, then

this isn't particularly the case. it's that the FLA technology is not 
documented and changes from version to version.

think .doc for the web. =)

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo
humru othro a kohnu se
GPG Fingerprint: 8B8B 2209 0C6F 7C47 B1EA  EE75 D6B7 2EB1 A7F1 DB43

Full time KDE developer sponsored by Trolltech (http://www.trolltech.com)
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