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Our Blogs Open Sauce - A GNU perspective Adobe: fresh AIR or stale air?
Our Blogs Open Sauce - A GNU perspective Adobe: fresh AIR or stale air? | Adobe: fresh AIR or stale air? |
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| by Sam Varghese | |
| Tuesday, 06 May 2008 | |
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Page 2 of 2 Hence, if Microsoft can put a dent in Adobe, it would be sweet payback indeed. Given that there are two camps these days - Microsoft plus its acolytes vs the others - Adobe has gone into the other camp. It's funny how companies can suddenly get religion about being open when they hear Microsoft breathing heavily some distance behind. Adobe has done better than most in keeping its little niche competition-free but apparently it now feels that it has to throw in its lot with the open source crowd. In doing so, it is merely joining a rather long queue. To some extent, Adobe's move reminds one of Sun which for a long time toyed with dipping its toes in the open source water but always refused to get fully wet. Sun, by the way, is still doing that same verbal fandance. So to with Adobe - it's another case of having one foot in the grave and the other in a patch of grease, of trying to have one's cake and eat it too. Despite all the talk, you won't get the source code for the Linux version of Adobe Integrated Runrime. (AIR is defined as a "cross-operating system runtime environment for building rich internet applications using Adobe Flash, Adobe Flex, HTML, and Ajax, that can be deployed as a desktop application.") The licence for the 1.0 version of AIR applies to the AIR for Linux alpha release - and in the licence agreement one can clearly see the following: "No modification or reverse engineering: You may not modify, adapt, translate or create derivative works based upon the Software (sic). You will not reverse engineer, decompile, disassemble or otherwise attempt to discover the source code of the Software (sic) except to the extent you may be expressly permitted to reverse engineer or decompile under applicable law." The Linux Foundation has welcomed Adobe's move - but then since Adobe jumped on board as a member a month or so before the announcement, you wouldn't expect the LF chief Jim Zemlin to frown. Membership isn't free. Here's some of what Zemlin had to say: "Adobe's decision to join the LF is a natural extension of its commitment to open standards and open source, which demonstrates its leadership and foresight in the software industry." Silverlight may be the main reason behind Adobe's move but the prospect of getting a whole lot of fresh brains on board to drive development for the Linux version of AIR cannot be far behind. That's precisely why Adobe has released alpha software - and the reason isn't something it cares to hide: "Feedback from the community is a crucial component to our software development process at Adobe. By releasing an early version of AIR for Linux, we anticipate discovering issues sooner which ultimately helps improve the quality of the product." But developers who are clued in aren't too enthused about the announcement. Internet Vision Technologies' chief Jonathan Oxer, a Melbourne-based web developer and former president of Linux Australia, wasn't exactly over the moon. Neither was Jeff Kruize, a senior web developer who works for the same company. "Adobe have removed the licensing restrictions for both the SWF and FLV/F4V formats in order to help promote greater adoption of the Flash platform across a greater range of devices and systems," said Kruize who works with Flex. However, he preferred to look on the positive side. "This will help place them in a better position to face increasing competition from both Microsoft (Silverlight) and Sun (JavaFX). Regardless of the motives behind the decision, the fact remains that the less restrictions and costs involved in programming for a particular platform, the better it is for both developers and users."
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