In November, I joined a panel at Adobe Max focused on the promise and pitfalls of open source.
I wrote at the time that open source is not a binary decision for Adobe Systems (or, really, any company): it's hard work and not the right answer to every question.
The Register on Tuesday picks up on the "hard work" theme and runs with it, detailing lessons learned from open-sourcing Flex, Adobe's Flash development tool. In addition to "treading a fine line between tipping off competitors to its Flex plans through the open-source work while coaxing the community to buy into the Flex road map," Adobe is learning that community involvement doesn't come cheaply...or sometimes doesn't come at all.
There is a pervasive myth in the industry that "community" forms around pretty much any well-designed open-source project. The opposite is true. Most projects are devoid of community in any meaningful sense. This becomes even more pronounced in projects that are dominated by a single vendor.
It's not that good open-source projects are company-free. They aren't. They're the opposite: Linux, Apache, Eclipse, etc., are filled to the brim with companies. In fact, most open-source projects are simply amalgamations of corporate interests (vendors, enterprise IT, system integrators, etc.), including "community" projects like Linux, Joomla, and Apache.
The difference between these and Adobe's Flex, however, is that there are multiple counter-balancing corporate interests involved, not just one. If Adobe wants to make Flex a true open-source project (and it's very likely that it doesn't, and for very good reasons), it needs to put Flex into a foundation structure, similar to Eclipse, Mozilla, and others, just as many have clamored for Sun to do with Java and OpenOffice.org.
In sum, open source is exceptionally hard work, but the job is made doubly difficult when one company seeks to retain control of a project.
Sun just lost the CTO of its desktop division, Hans Muller. Not to worry, though, the open-source world gets to keep him as he's heading down the road to increasingly open-source friendly Adobe to work on Flex. Muller apparently wasn't part of the Sun layoffs, and remained a good employee to the last, clearing up loose ends in the very same breath that he announced his resignation.
What does this mean for Adobe? A great new technical lead for open-source Flex. And for Sun? Probably not much, but I'm sure Sun would have preferred to keep Muller.
In yet another sign that the world's leading software companies are losing their inhibitions around open source, Adobe announced today the launch of the open-source BlazeDS project, high-performance remoting and messaging technology used to "connect back-end data sources to rich Internet applications written with its Flex development tool." This is very cool.
... Read MoreBlazeDS will be made available for free under the Lesser General Public License (LGPL). Adobe will initially hosts the open-source project and next year plans to create a separate site to host BlazeDS and its Flex developer tool which it intends to open source, said Phil Costa, director of product management for Adobe's Platform Business Unit.
The software is not meant to replace other messaging products, such as enterprise service buses, Costa said. Instead, it can get data from messaging software to move data between databases or enterprise applications and Flash clients, he said.
I just took the time to read through this interview with Phil Costa, director of Product Management for Flex at Adobe. (Many thanks to Dave McAllister for his link.) You may remember that Adobe announced in April its intention to open-source Flex.
Now, the company is talking about why. It's very interesting to see that the decision to open-source a product is somewhat universal in the considerations that go into it. It brings back memories of early 2003 when we (at Novell) were giddy about releasing the company's UDDI server as open source...
I particularly found Phil's thoughts on the LGPL (i.e., why Adobe opted not to go with LGPL and instead used MPL) fascinating.
At its core, Adobe's decision to open-source flex stemmed from a desire to make the project bigger than the company. That is, independent of the company. Something you could embrace without embracing the company, too. This is precisely the same reasoning that went into Alfresco's decision to GPL our enterprise content management system, so Phil's comments resonate with me.
In response to How Software Is Built's question as to why Adobe decided to open-source Flex, Phil replied:
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