JD on EP

The cynical side of this suspects me that it's an August ad-revenue ploy... Stephen's text starts and closes with the implicit question "Should Adobe do all 'opensource' and only 'opensource'?"

I wouldn't mind such conversations myself, so long as it's play hard, play fair, nobody hurt.

But that "Adobe bashes opensource" headline bothers me. It drives wedges between people. There's no need for it. He may have just used Johnny's post as a convenient link for an August traffic drive. He might also be hoping for some outraged traffic coming in, so I was of two minds whether to post this reply at all.

The ironical bashing of Adobe's work here in delivering source code along with applications... that's offensive to me, and caused me to react. I'd be okay with discussions about what Adobe might do in the future, but such needless polarity as "Adobe bashes opensource" seems a waste of opportunity. Particularly if it does turn out to be in the pursuit of commercial gain. Such polarization just plain doesn't seem necessary to me.

This author in his closing sentence "free Photoshop no doubt would appeal to a lot of people who today pay hundreds of dollars for it-" once again assumes "open source" = "free".

I wish he would have kicked off the article with that - then I could have stopped reading.

Now I'm bummed that Techmeme is linking this article in to some real news, about the new Player.

I wish I had just cussed the guy under my breath and not even rebutted him.... :(

I would probably ask Adobe to open source their installers, maybe some creative thinking and development outside there can probably help to reduce the 25 minutes required to install Flash CS3 and the 20 required to remove it. And I would like to have a better control over the options at install time.

Now The Register asserts that one style, and one style only, fits all needs. Sample of the analysis: "Adobe is home to the prestigious Photoshop, Illustrator, Dreamweaver, and Flash products, which all face growing pressure from FOSS and online products and services."

Techmeme's spazzing back and forth between considering "Adobe Bashes" as a Moviestar story. I feel guilty that I diluted the message by even mentioning such divisive, inaccurate writing.

As the author of both the headline and the blog, I'm glad you took the time to write down your thoughts, not just curse me inwardly, because it affords me the opportunity to offer the following response. It is, as the blogosphere cliche goes, a conversation.

The headline is perhaps a bit snarky, but I don't think it's not wholly inaccurate. John Loiacono took pains to point out the flaws of open-source software that competes with his own Adobe Systems Creative Suite product suite, and calling them a waste of time for "many" creative pros. Sure, his blog posting wasn't a wholesale bashing, but there was bashing--just as your headline bashes my posting without calling out the fact that I noted Loiacono's perspective has some merit, or that I opened the piece by observing Adobe has made some of its own products open-source software.

(And lest you think I'm a close-minded open-source partisan here, I agree with Loiacono to an extent. I've spent my own money for Adobe software, and since you might have a soft spot for Macromedia products, too, I bought Freehand and Fontographer. I've used the Gimp and don't care for it, overall, and I'm a fan of Adobe Lightroom.)

The main reason I wrote the post was that I was unsatisfied with Loiacono's argument about whether Adobe's should release its own products as open-source software. I agree there are problems with the proprietary alternatives to Creative Suite, but that seems to me tangential to whether Adobe should open-source its own software. Loiacono might have found fault with elements of Linux when he was at Sun Microsystems, but that doesn't mean an open-source Solaris would necessarily be afflicted with the same problems. If Loiacono's "time is money" argument was the only one in his blog post, I wouldn't have griped, but he specifically raises the open-source CS point: "I have thought about whether open source has a place in Adobe's creative products strategy."

Fundamentally, I wish Loiacono had offered a better argument about why or why not to open-source its creative products. I raised potential the legal and business ones in my blog. I think the developer, user and community issues are another. Or are there parts of product lines that could be made open source? So if I were going to go back and rewrite that headline, I guess I wouldn't water it down so much as I'd gripe about Loiacono's explanation.

Oops--I meant to say that I don't think the headline is wholly inaccurate.

Thanks for investing the time in typing more -- I read it all, twice -- but my original comment still holds:

I think the headline "Adobe bashes open-source alternatives" is more than a little excessive as a summary for this essay, even for the dogdays of August.

jd