Screaming Penguin - Source Does Matter

Skankland at news.com.com.com.com/~com/com has this callout of Adobe in Open Source doublespeak:

In a blog posting Sunday, Adobe's top creative products executive, John Loiacono, made unflattering remarks about open-source alternatives whose free cost is offset by the time that creative pros have to spend fiddling. [snip]

Loiacono legitimately points to his open-source credentials as the top Sun Microsystems software executive who oversaw much of that company's work releasing its Solaris operating system as open-source software. But his logic is a little wonky in this case.

"Obviously, I have thought about whether open source has a place in Adobe's creative products strategy. But what designers need is tightly-integrated workflows and high reliability right out of the box, so the really important question to ask is what's the impact to the user," he said, then concludes, "Open-source software can be a perfect solution. It's just not right for everything. Or for everyone--like many creative professionals who are on deadline and prefer to innovate vs. integrate."

It's well and good to look at things from the user's perspective, but in this case it leads to a false dichotomy. Loiacono appears to be considering only outside open-source alternatives such as Inkscape or the Gimp.

There's nothing technological stopping Adobe from releasing software that's both open-source as well as integrated and easy to use. But it's misleading to point to the shortcomings of others' open-source software as a reason why Adobe shouldn't open-source its own.

So here is the thing. Sure, this is an inartful statement, but I am not sure Adobe is wrong here.

1. I have never seen an open source project with the polish of an Adobe product. One of the things about "release early, release often" is that open source projects are almost always a work in progress. While for those of us in "the biz" this is generally seen as a positive, you have to understand the market here.

One of the things I ranted to Oliver and Josh about at J1 last year, is that for JavaFX to really see penetration, it needs a Graphic Designer tool with the same level of fit and finish that Flash Studio has. The Flex/Eclipse based stuff might be OK for programmers, but the artsy clique needs something way better. A "NetBeans Plugin" frankly isn't going to cut it. Granted this doesn't mean Adobe couldn't do a Fedora/RHEL pattern on their products, but really, who uses RHEL except on prod server environments?

2. Open source works best as a "scratch your own itch" product. Let's face it, the people who USE Premiere or Photoshop are not the peopel who are able to WORK ON premiere or Photoshop. Granted for some products, there is a fair crossover. People who use Linux might not work on Linux, but enough people who CAN work on Linux use it to make the crossover. Illustrator isn't one of those things. The crossover between authors and users is almost nil. Frankly, this is why GIMP and Inkscape are still at the level they are at. They are tools with a programmer-driven product strategy, and these tools rarely solve the problems a programmer faces.

Adobe has done a good job with the open source stuff in the right areas, I think. Granted I still find the buy-in cost of Flex Server to be outrageous, but they have struck a good balance between open source and free-as-in-beer with their tools targeted at programmers. I don't give a shit if Illustrator is open source.