There was me thinking I had an angle- about the implications for Internet Explorer. But pesky David Berlind took my idea even further.
Damn your eyes Berlind, how is anybody supposed to have an insight with you banging away ten to the dozen at ZDNet. Pesky editor reporter analyst types.
Suffice to say I think Adobe’s move here is really good? Why? Not for what it gives the OSS community, but for what it gives Adobe.
You see Adobe’s biggest problem right now is an innovation glut. It has just built too much cool stuff. So why not let the market decide what flies and what doesn’t? That is what markets are good for. Let the market encourage modularity.
I like David’s point about Flash/HTML as an accepted pattern. Adobe should beware negative language that might damage potential goodwill in this space.
Anne says:
November 8, 2006 at 6:22 pm
That was a great piece, wasn’t it? I had a massive rambling post started about how big software companies had to demarketize their stuff or have to deal with others demarketizing it for them… then I read Berlind’s post and realized he said it better and all in the context of the news of the day. Sigh.
What do you mean by let the market decide what flies and what doesn’t out of Adobe’s innovation glut? Doesn’t that just amount to offering your products for sale and seeing who buys it? Business as usual?
Savio Rodrigues says:
November 9, 2006 at 5:39 am
Since the ActionScript will be included in Firefox under the MPL, then Microsoft could add it to IE and still keep IE under a commercial license, as per the terms of the MPL ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Public_License ). Or, couldn’t Adobe, as copyright holders to the current code, make it available to Microsoft under a separate license?
In either case, it’s good to see Adobe getting into the spirit…even though I dread the growing use of Flash as a UI for web applications. Not because I’m a luddite, but because of usability issues and encouraging designs that go against users mental models of browser functionality. For eg: try using the Back button or the Firefox Back mouse gesture in a Flash driven site and see if the result is what you expected. 😉