JD on EP

"Proprietarize"? Egad. Try "appropriate."

Google, in opening the source code, is far more open than (say) Flash, and so praise and thanks are in order, not unprompted FUD.

Neither Google or Adobe can claim to be truly "open" companies. They're much more on their way to that than say "Microsoft" but their business models simply do not allow them to be completely open. If Adobe ever wishes to be truly open, they'd have to open source all of their software tools (photoshop, flash, etc.) and they'd have to open source the ColdFusion server (which competitor New Atlanta just did with their CFML server, BlueDragon). How would Adobe make money then? Perhaps by transitioning tons of their employees into being part-time high-paid consultants, by leveraging the developer community and having them assist in the development of Adobe products meanwhile Adobe Developers would use their extra free time to provide more services as opposed to product development. It would be a difficult and highly improbably transition, but only then could Adobe claim to be a truly open company in the same way that Linux, or Apache, or countless others are actually open.

We have to be rational when we demand that these companies be "open". They are COMPANIES, not CHARITIES or NON-PROFITS. They don't take donations, they have to make profits and satisfy investors. If you want to know realistically whether a company will move towards openess, look at their business model, look at where their revenue comes from. They can't simply abandon the revenue streams that they're used to overnight. Otherwise, they'll be out of business and their openess won't matter at all.

John, don't let "Data Envy" with Google get the best of you, keep in mind that Google probably has "Platform Envy" with Adobe for their Flash and soon to be AIR install base :-)

Yes, I made up a word. ;-)

The point in this post is not "ooh who is more open" but to focus on the sleight-of-hand in referring to "open" only for code. The proprietary and opaque databases of the adserving networks will, I believe, turn out to be far, far, far more significant than whether all digital projects include source files.

jd/adobe

John, good observation, that I can agree with :-)

"Google, in opening the source code, is far more open than (say) Flash"

Though Flash isn't entirely open, there are significant open source parts. For instance, the ActionScript 3 virtual machine in Flash Player became Tamarin, an open source project managed by Mozilla, which should become part of Firefox eventually. Being built on Eclipse, parts of Flex Builder (things that Adobe needed that weren't in the Eclipse core) are available for other Eclipse developers to use. Finally, the compilers used by the Flex SDK/Flex Builder/Flash CS3 are open source too.

As I said, it's not completely open, but Adobe has shown that they're more than willing to share quite a bit of their source code.

With respect to open data, what does that really mean. Does it mean you can see the info someone has collected on you, OR you can just see what kind of data someone has collected on you but not the actual data OR you can see the data someone has collected on everyone.

[jd sez: Anything along those lines would be helpful. My point is that it's not sensible to get all huffy about clientside source code being available during a private data-collection effort.]