Adobe Unveils Open Source Library

anamexis writes "Adobe premiered (no pun intended) opensource.adobe.com recently. The first two libraries available, titled Adam and Eve, respectively, take on complex GUI issues in applications. They are written in C++ and have been released under the MIT License, an OSI-Approved Open Source License."

Re:The GIMP

[1010011010]

Too Lazy? It's one of the shortest licenses known to man:

The MIT License

Copyright (c)

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

So, YES, Gimp could use the Adobe UI, as long as it includes the "obnoxious advertising clause".

It looks like the x11 license to me.

[Anonymous Coward]

X11 License
This is a simple, permissive non-copyleft free software license, compatible with the GNU GPL.

This license is sometimes called the "MIT" license, but that term is misleading, since MIT has used many licenses for software.

source [gnu.org]

The MIT License

[nick8325]

It's very similar to the BSD license in style:

Copyright (c) year copyright holders

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

Apparently the main difference is that BSD explicity forbids you from saying that you were endorsed by the original writer.

A good list of licenses is http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/license-list .html [fsf.org]

Re:The GIMP

[lordpixel]

That's not the obnoxious advertising clause.

The OAC was a part of the BSD license which used to say you had to print out a message when your program started up giving props to the Regents of the University of Berkley, CA or some such.

This was probably the only real difference between the MIT and BSD licenses, but since the BSD license dropped this clause, they're the same for all intents and purposes.

On MacSlash since yesterday !

[mirko]

This article was featrued on MacSlash [macslash.org] since yesterday !

Re:Help me out...

[dauthur]

These files can be used to make newer "user-released" projects, just as how Linux works, as well as E-mule, Mozilla, Soulseek and other opensource projects. Anyone can update the program to tailour their needs.
Say I needed to fix a compatability issue in Photoshop so I could run PSP/JFR files from Paint Shop Pro. The problem is getting Adobe to read PSP files, and getting PSP to read Adobe files. If I needed to do this, I wouldn't have to wait for Adobe to come out with a fix.

Re:That's cool...

[TuringTest]

release something worthwhile under an open source license, like the backend stuff for Acrobat or something...

So what about the backend stuff for Photoshop? 'cos that's what they've released:


Eve (the name is derived from Express View Engine) is a layout engine and declarative language for constructing a human interface (HI) layout. Eve was developed originally for Photoshop (a prototype version was used in Photoshop 5) and has since seen gradual evolution and integration into other Adobe applications.

Re:Dmitry Sklyarov

[Icarus1919]

http://news.com.com/2100-1023-978497.html [com.com]

He ended up not serving a sentence at all. He was released from charges by the government which went after the company he worked for instead, and the jury acquitted the company of all charges. Looks like the system worked for once. Too bad no one took advantage of the chance to strike down the DMCA (or at least parts of it) as unconstitutional.

Re:Dmitry Sklyarov

[alwsn]

To those wondering what the parent is talking about... ElcomSoft verdict: Not guilty [com.com]

Re:Acrobat Reader

[shawb]

Thankfully, Acrobat is not a monolithic piece of crap. All the stuff that takes so long to run is extra plugins, and they can be disabled. [codebetter.com] There are even programs to do it automatically, but this is something that I would trust doing manually over some program. I mean, if I somehow mess up Acrobat removing some plugins, I reinstall Acrobat. If the program messes up the system, is loaded with spyware or whatever, then the whole OS might have to go. [iamnotageek.com]

Re:Help me out...

[Swamii]

For the less code-literate among us, what exactly do these files do?

In layman's terms, it's a collection of pieces of code (Application Programming Interface) for building a user interface. This aides developers in writing applications that have user interfaces (i.e. most desktop applications).

Re:Acrobat Reader

[Anonymous Coward]

No, he means more like pdfcreator [sourceforge.net] , at least for the writing side. There are enough readers already.

Re:Acrobat Reader

[uss_valiant]

A friend uses acroread 7 (beta) on his solaris (or was it linux) machine and it's really good. I'm also very pleased with the reader in version 7 on windows. It's so much better, faster, more responsive, ... than version 6. It's probably as fast as version 5 with more features than version 6.
After the disastrous version 6, Adobe fixed the issues with version 7 and I can honestly recommend using the most recent Acrobat Reader version again.

Re:Nothing to see here

[Gorath99]

From the documentation: Adam is a modeling engine and declarative language for describing constraints and relationships on a collection of value, typically the parameters to an application command. When bound to a human interface (HI) Adam provides the logic that controls the HI behavior. Adam is similar in concept to a spreadsheet or a forms manager. Values are set and dependent values are recalculated. Adam provides facilities to resolve interrelated dependencies and to track those dependencies, beyond what a spreadsheet provides. Eve consists of a declarative language and layout engine for constructing an HI. The layout engine in Eve takes into account a rich description of UI elements to achieve a high quality layout - rivaling what can be achieved with manual placement. A single HI description in Eve suffices for multiple OS platforms and languages. This document describes Eve2, the latest version of Eve. Eve2 was developed to work with Adam and to incorporate many improvements that have been requested since Eve1 was written. I must admit that I haven't looked at the code in great detail, but that doesn't sound very trivial to me. Also, 1749K of zip compressed C++ code would be a heck of a lot of trivial code.

Sorry, I'm an idiot. Readable version here.

[Gorath99]

From the documentation:

Adam is a modeling engine and declarative language for describing constraints and relationships on a collection of value, typically the parameters to an application command. When bound to a human interface (HI) Adam provides the logic that controls the HI behavior. Adam is similar in concept to a spreadsheet or a forms manager. Values are set and dependent values are recalculated. Adam provides facilities to resolve interrelated dependencies and to track those dependencies, beyond what a spreadsheet provides.

Eve consists of a declarative language and layout engine for constructing an HI. The layout engine in Eve takes into account a rich description of UI elements to achieve a high quality layout - rivaling what can be achieved with manual placement. A single HI description in Eve suffices for multiple OS platforms and languages. This document describes Eve2, the latest version of Eve. Eve2 was developed to work with Adam and to incorporate many improvements that have been requested since Eve1 was written.

I must admit that I haven't looked at the code in great detail, but that doesn't sound very trivial to me. Also, 1749K of zip compressed C++ code would be a heck of a lot of trivial code.

Re:The GIMP

[Richard_at_work]

Theres no Advertising Clause in the MIT license - what the grandparent is calling the OAC is simply the bog standard copyright acknowledgement that goes in each sourcecode file. See the post a few posts down about the OpenBSD license - that certainly has no OAC and has pretty much the same wording.

Re:Acrobat Reader

[Anonymous Coward]

I recall that a while back Acrobat had a bug where it crashed when you tried to run it under Mozilla. It had to do with it checing for a locale that wasn't there or invalid in some way. I wrapped the acroread command in a script that set the locale to "C" and that fixed it. Some or all of this post may be wrong, this was a couple of years ago and I don't remember it exactly.

Re:The GIMP

[molnarcs]

It makes it incompatible with GPL just like the original BSD license

No, it does not. It prevents you from stripping off the copyright notice, just like GPL or current BSD licence does.

Re:If is looks like the acroreader for linux...

[Noksagt]

While acroread 5 is horrible (and the parent therefore deserves the Funny mod), the beta version of acroread 7 is a nice enough GTK app. I still have complaints & it isn't enough to switch me off of xpdf [foolabs.com], I no longer cringe when I need some peculiar features from acroread.

Re:Acrobat Reader

[Hmmble]

Acoording to this article (Dutch) [vnunet.nl] the Linux version of Adobe Reader 7.0 will be available somewhere this month (March)

And where is the wrongdoing?

[KZigurs]

Linux IS tier-2, unimportant platform as far as it concerns Adobe. You know, that Desktop Linux - Yeah, This Is The Year.

Scientific community on unix is pretty settled down on Latex or postscript and you truly have no need for PDF in server envorement.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Acrobat Reader

[OldMiner]

I troubleshot this problem before, but I don't have the links handy. The short version is that it's a bug in the program itself, where it asks for too-general of a font, which causes buffer overflows. When requesting a font in X there's a whole bunch of dashes and asterisks such as -*-fixed-medium-r-normal--15-*-*-*-c-90-iso8859-1 [purdue.edu]. Each of these asterisks is an "I don't care" value. "I don't care what foundry it's from." "I don't care about its resolution." Or say -*-fixed-medium-r-normal--15-*-*-*-c-90-* which also says "I don't care about its encoding."

The encoding part is what you're getting around. When you have a proper LANG setting, like "en_US" the libraries you're using will recognize this and provide you with a nice beefy font. You'll often get a font which is not a nice, normal 8-bit font. It could be all wacky with like thousands of freaking characters, for, like, doing stuff outside of the Latin language set. Crazy.

When proper international fonts were being developed and the developers started to test applications, they realized that there were a ton of applications with this problem. They simply requested a font where they didn't specify encoding, and they couldn't deal with certain encodings that were returned, and they'd segfault. Therefore, making international-capable fonts standard was put off for many months while developers were encouraged to fix their applications. Unfortunately, Acrobat Reader is one of the stragglers. The recommended solution I've seen is to rename acroread and add a script in its place which sets the LANG variable and then runs the renamed executable.

Adobe's docking tab window patent is invalid.

[SimHacker]

Adobe's docking tabbed window patent is totally bogus, and it should be invalidated.

Here are some pictures of dockable [catalog.com] tab [catalog.com] windows [catalog.com] in a visual PostScript debugger for NeWS called "PSIBER (for PostScript Interactive Bug Eradication Routines) [catalog.com]", that I wrote at the University of Maryland Human Computer Interaction Lab in 1989. And also Tab Windows with Pie Menus for The NeWS Toolkit [donhopkins.com] that I wrote at Sun in 1990.

What's ironic is that Adobe wrote PostScript, so I corresponded with Adobe employees about PSIBER when I was writing it, even sending them early copies of the source code. Understandably they were very interested in a visual PostScript debugger. So Adobe certainly knew about prior art of docking tabbed windows since 1989.

-Don

Re:Worthless as is...

[Anonymous Coward]

umm... did you download and look? there is a directory full of examples. Looking and learning isn't as much fun as bitching on /., though, I suppose.

Re:Dmitry Sklyarov

[StormReaver]

"He ended up not serving a sentence at all."

He stayed in jail for 6 months waiting for his trial. Adobe can rot in Hell as far as I'm concerned.

Re:That's cool...

[the quick brown fox]

Actually it's more like the frontend stuff for Photoshop--or more precisely, the engine that drives parts of the frontend.

Re:Worthless as is...

[the quick brown fox]

There is an example right in the introduction [adobe.com].

Looks like an interesting pair of libraries

[podperson]

Adam and Eve are two separate but related libraries.

Adam allows you to express a bunch of things in terms of other things (e.g. this button's right edge needs to be 10 pixels left of that button's left edge OR this HSV setting is related to that RGB setting) and then have them automagically be kept updated. Neat.

Eve is a UI library. It seems to allow for automated layouts (as well as manual?) and depends on Adam for some of its functionality.

Both depend on the boost C++ libraries.

An on-topic post

[arekusu]

Disclaimer: I used to work for Adobe. I left a few years ago.

I have experience with EVE that may be more interesting to read that a bunch of anti-Adobe slurs: For a while it was my job to localize Illustrator, and part of that involved converting the old DITL and .rc UI resources into expressviews (the precursor to EVE.)

At the time, Illustrator had somewhere around six or seven hundred dialogs. Times fourteen languages. Times a few platforms (OS 9, OS X, 95/98/ME/NT, XP). That's a LOT of UI to program, translate, and test.

EVE lets you describe a dialog with one XML-ish text file, and have that layout work for all languages on all platforms. That is a significant potential reduction in UI programming (and hopefully bugs.)

It looks good, too. Take a look at Photoshop or Illustrator's UI. I don't mean the wacky custom controls-- I mean look at the widget layouts. Can you tell which ones were painstakingly created by a human, and which ones are being generated on the fly?

When I was working with this technology, there were a class of problems that couldn't be easily handled (such as alignment across separate view hierarchies) but it looks like EVE2 is fixing most of those areas.

I can't really comment on ADAM since that wasn't at a usable stage when I was at Adobe. Some people have commented that the static binding dates it, compared to say 10.3's Cocoa bindings and KVO. Maybe, but any sort of binding that gets rid of huge chunks of UI glue code is a good thing. It's in C++ because that's what Adobe's giant cross-platform codebases are.

So, this is good stuff. It works. Now you can play with it. What's wrong with that?

Re:professionals

[Anonymous Coward]

Interesting story about that is that Apple approached Adobe to make Premier for OS X, and they flat out said no, which surprised Jobs. So Apple decided to make their own, which the started with a fledging product from Macromedia. That development created Final Cut Pro/Express, and iMovie.