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It will come as no surprise to readers of this blog that the old proprietary software companies are finally seeing the light and beginning – some faster, some slower – to open up. Adobe is one such company, and to consolidate its moves it has set up a new site, called simply Adobe Open Source
Adobe Acrobat was the first software to support Adobe Systems’ Portable Document Format (PDF). It is a family of software, some commercial and some free of charge. The Adobe Acrobat Reader program (now just called Adobe Reader) is available as a no-charge download from Adobe’s web site, and allows the viewing and printing of PDF files.
Over the years, Adobe has become more Linux friendly. First, Adobe released an excellent version of its Flash Player for Linux, and, more recently, the company launched a version of AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime) for Linux. Now, however, with Strobe, its just announced Flash framework, Adobe looks like it may be getting more open-source friendly as well.
Fedora 15, code-named Lovelock, does not ship with commercial applications. Which means that you are not able to install essential applications like Adobe Flash Player from the graphical package manager. There are a few open source Flash plugins, but they do not render current Flash content very well, if at all.
He’s the man who brought open source to Silicon Graphics and NEC and advisor to Warburg Pincus on how to make money investing in open source. "At one point I got the title of open source's undercover agent," recalls Dave McAllister.
Today Adobe announced a series of changes to its emerging web applications platform. The changes include:
--The next version of the mobile Flash runtime will be free of license fees. Adobe also confirmed that the mobile version of the Air runtime will be free.
Now Adobe, which controls Flash and Flash Video, is trying to change that with the introduction of DRM restrictions in version 9 of its Flash Player and version 3 of its Flash Media Server software. Instead of an ordinary web download, these programs can use a proprietary, secret Adobe protocol to talk to each other, encrypting the communication and locking out non-Adobe software players and video tools. We imagine that Adobe has no illusions that this will stop copyright infringement -- any more than dozens of other DRM systems have done so -- but the introduction of encryption does give Adobe and its customers a powerful new legal weapon against competitors and ordinary users through the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).
I recently suggested that, given Apple and Adobe's growing war over iPad and iPhone applications, it would make sense for Adobe to move not only its end-user applications, but its Creative Suite development stack, to Linux. While I don't know if Adobe is considering it, Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu Linux, would welcome Adobe.
