Adobe has announced the open sourcing of its ActionScript virtual machine to Mozilla through the Tamarin project. This does not in any way mean that Flash itself is being open sourced, so don’t start thinking about some utopia where Flash and Ajax dance harmoniously together. The main benefit to Firefox users should be faster JavaScript performance, as the ActionScript engine does some fancy just-in-time compiling of code into native machine instructions. Maybe ActionScript and JavaScript will eventually work better together too–that shouldn’t be too hard, considering they’re both built on the ECMAScript standard. The main difference is that ActionScript deals in Flash objects like sprites while JavaScript handles document objects like a tree of HTML.
What does this indicate about Adobe’s commitment to opening up their crown jewels, PDF and Flash? Not much. Adobe’s excitement over Apollo suggests that their real hope may be to draw more and more developers into their closed-source, closed-runtime world. Apollo is a means of building cross-platform desktop applications that combine open Internet technologies like HTML and JavaScript with Flash. It’s not bad technology, in fact, it’s rather cool in how it unifies Flash and HTML rendering. And it includes mobile platforms in its cross-platform story. But it’s moving in the opposite direction from the most exhilarating and potentially successful trends in the software market.
It’s not at all obvious what big software companies should do, confronted with the challenge of open source. Cote’ was wondering about it yesterday:
Open source companies, of course, don’t mind taking less. To them, the only direction to go is up, so they don’t have to worry about cutting out middle-ware licensing fees. They realize, and are realizing, that software itself has less and less value as open source middle-ware matures.
As I come back to frequently, the question becomes: can that theory of software value support the size of companies like IBM, Microsoft, Adobe, and other companies that were born in the closed source, licensed software world?
The facile answer is: nothing lasts forever; too bad, big guys. But that’s a hypothetical end point of the current direction in the industry, not a way to profit from the dynamics of today’s software market, where there are tons of opportunities left to capture and mold and amplify. Big companies are in a bind, but they have a few degrees of freedom. First, there will always be big companies that want to deal with other big companies and have the purchasing power to do so–this is obviously no time to give up on that. Second, big software companies can join in the open source party, undercut their competitors (like Adobe has just done to Microsoft) and commit to a new way of doing business. That second likely means painful transformation, but the alternative might be stagnation or death. I suspect Adobe might be up for transformation; swallowing Macromedia shows their appetite for change. Today’s announcement was good news. Even if it was motivated mainly by thoughts of handicapping Internet Explorer or capturing good will from open source fans, it’s a good thing for users, for developers, for Mozilla, and for Adobe.
2 Comments
Anne:
I couldn’t agree more with your assessment that this move is great for developers. Within Adobe, there are a vast number of people who love open source and standards. In the last year, Adobe has released many free or open source projects either directly or indirectly. RIAForge.org is going strong in its’ first two months, the new XMP SDK toolkit is popular with the “C” crowd and XPAAJ has resulted in great ways for Java Developers to manipulate PDF documents.
http://www.adobe.com/products/xmp/
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/livecycle/downloads/xpaaj.html
http://www.riaforge.org
Also check out this - http://opensource.adobe.com/
The concept of nothing lasting forever was summarized really well in an article entitled “Walking the Stack” which I cannot find any more given the term also has connotations in programming and search results are buried. The idea is that over time, most technology becomes a commodity and companies keep having to innovate to add new value. The PDF standard is a great case study in this. PDF could have easily just slipped into the stack as TCP/IP, XML, HTTP and other technologies have but it kept evolving due to the hunger of the users for more functionality and the response by Adobe and the community.
I also find open sourcing existing product is much harder for larger incumbent companies to rationalize. Usually, Open sourcing a product or library is done by a smaller company as a strategy to get an initial buy in. When a company is public and has shareholders who expect a return on their investment into the shares, they are more reluctant to allow a company to open source a product or donate code to an open source organization. In our case, we have a state of the art CEO who understands the values of open source and is someone I am personally proud of for making the decisions to let us open source stuff. Bruce is one of, if not the best CEO in the industry IMO. The upper management also listen to developers who make recommendations about putting technologies into standards bodies or open source where it makes sense but collectively we still have a responsibility to our shareholders (of which I am one too
The key to the strategy is balance - let the open source community get access to stuff to help with maintenance, innovation and adoption while still keeping a business model that benefits the community and the shareholders.
Once more, I am glad you like the direction and I want to thank you for getting the word out too. People need to know Adobe is about much more than Photoshop, Flash and PDF. Cheers!
PS - I now read your blog almost daily
Duane
Hi Duane, thanks for stopping by! Adobe appears to be doing a great job of walking the balance beam between open source and proprietary models–what an exciting time to be there.
Of course you have to keep your shareholders in mind, one difficult thing as you know is satisfying them in the short run while still positioning for long term opportunities and challenges.
That sounds like a great paper on commoditization. I will keep an eye out for it.
I read your blog too and I can’t wait to hear more about what you guys are doing. Since I’ve been writing about Adobe products I’ve heard from many passionate Flash developers; it’s great to feel the energy of such a devoted community.