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Adobe CEO on Open Source 82

Posted by CmdrTaco from the stuff-to-read dept.
Reeses writes "ZDNet has an interview with John Warnock, CEO of Adobe, and has his impressions of Open Source software, and what Adobe plans on doing with it. " Assorted childish jabs at Quark, the laughable proposition that they really should be in the portal business, and assorted comments on the Open Source movement. All in all, a very amusing piece worth a read- it gets better half way in.
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Adobe CEO on Open Source More

Adobe CEO on Open Source

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  • Here come the "experts" (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Can't wait to hear from all the undergrads who can't manage a lemon-aid stand to chime in describing how a guy who has built a mutli-billion dollar business is a moron because he hasn't embraced open-source.

  • Adobe - Here's how to use Open Source (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    This guy realy needs a reality check. I'm sure he
    means well, but as has been pointed out you can't
    just tell the OSS community to develop your
    commercial applications for you.

    First off, any software Adobe produces that they
    give away free should obviously be Open Sourced.
    Prime candidate is the Acrobat reader code. They
    don't sell it, or make any money out of it
    whatsoever. In fact, it pays them to have
    Acrobat Reader ported to as many platforms and
    be as functional as possible. If Adobe had made
    the slightest effort to even think about OSS,
    then Acrobat reader should have been Open Sourced
    years ago.

    Another candidate is Print Gear. I can understand
    that they want to keep the printer side
    interpreter as private code as this is what they
    sell, but again it pays them to have Print Gear
    drivers for as many platforms and applications
    as possible. Thus widening the market for print
    Gear printers. I accept though that this does
    hold commercial risks, but I realy can't see anyone reverse engineering the Print Gear printer
    side software. There's no commercial case for
    bothering. Having said that, Ghostscript did it
    for postscript. Has GS killed Adobe's PS proffits?
    Nope. Has it expanded the potential market for
    commewrcial PS products, licensed from Adobe?
    I know from my experience it has. We've bought
    PS printers specificaly to support GS systems.

    For adobe to take advantage of the OSS community
    they need to realise that this is a two way
    deal. There has to be something in it for the
    OSS community and the user base in general too,
    not just Adobe's share holders.


    Simon Hibbs

  • Samael asks:

    Why should [Adobe] care about Open Source?

    Because if they don't care enough to at least understand it, they're going to have trouble making money. I don't think all companies need to drop everything and switch to Free Software immediately, but I think the companies who keep blinders on, who show as little comprehension of the issues as Adobe, are doomed to failure.

    Adobe has two cash cows, PhotoShop and PageMaker (to a lesser extent, Illustrator). There's already serious Free Software competition for one of them [gimp.org], and various people are starting up projects to compete with the other.

    ----
  • It's nice to hear somebody mention Gimps lack of CMYK color without getting all rabid, like it makes Gimp totally useless. Everytime I hear that argument, I think about how many people _don't_ need CMYK. The cat in the article himself said 93% of web graphics use Photoshop. He also neglected to mention that a vast portion of amateur webmasters have _pirated_ copies of Photoshop.

    As far as the vector graphics goes, try xfig. Its a stock item on any distro I ever used.

    For people like yourself who _need_ CMYK and Pantone, yes, you are shit outta luck, but you are most likely using a Mac anyway (best tool for the job and all). If graphics are your bread and butter, its not such a big deal to spend $500 on software because it'll pay for itself. The majority of people, however would be paying $500 for a feature they will never use.

    And if anybody say "But Gimp has no line tool fer crap sake!", the bezier tool does that.
  • Perhaps I'm just strange, but I have a problem trusting products whose names begin with "kill."
  • After looking at the name further, it bears a striking resemblance to "kill us traitor!" Perhaps it's a subliminal message from the developers, and they removed the "i" from "traitor" to diguise it.

    You never know.
  • Regarding vector drawing programs, just FYI: in addition to xfig [lbl.gov], there is also KIllustrator [uni-magdeburg.de], which is up to version 0.7, and will be part of the KDE 2.0/KOffice release.

    Of course, if you're primarily doing graphics for a living, you're better off sticking with your Mac for that, as I don't imagine there will be Pantone support in any Free Unix anytime soon.

    --

  • I noticed that after I posted it, but had never really noticed it before. Of course, for those who are unfamiliar, it is part of the KDE project: i.e., "K"-"Illustrator." :-)

    BTW. someone else in this thread suggested that I had obviously never used FreeHand or Illustrator. Actually, I have used both. And I wasn't saying that KIllustrator is a plug-in replacement for either of those two programs. It clearly isn't ready for use by graphics professionals (keep in mind, though, that most people aren't graphics professionals; I can assure you I'm not). But I will say that for version 0.7 of a free software project, it has the potential to become such a replacement eventually.

    --

  • Sure go ahead and keep fighting Quark, in the meantime GIMP will be kicking your sorry asses to the gutter. I also suggest you keep on yanking the eval version of PhotoShop of your web site so newbie webmasters, God forbid, might actually use PhotoShop and get hooked on it -- wouldn't want that to happen. Oh yeah, and why not keep on selling PhotoShop $500 per license -- that's a great idea! Hell, we all have money to throw away, make it $1000! Bundle in more usueless tools with it too... that'll teach those Quark-heads!!

    With regards to NT vs Linux to serve Adobe's "portal":

    "I want to pay for an operating system from a vendor with a contractual relationship that gives me recourse if things go wrong,"

    ...OK. Just try holding Microsoft responsible when things go wrong. Go ahead, try it. Don't worry we'll still be here to help you get up in running iwth a real OS when the big bad Redmond giant laughs at you and tells you to stick it up your butt with a coconut.

  • If you want to blame Microsoft, buy NT, but how much tech support does that really get anyone?

    If you want it to work, set up Linux. If you want to blame someone, buy it from a vendor. Who loses here?

    Oh yeah, and... standard disclaimer: if you *really* want to put *four* ethernet cards in one machine to serve *static* web pages to more users than will *ever* visit your web site, then get Microsoft to setup NT for you. At least for now. :)
  • ...is not an integral part of a proprietary product. A well-designed build process does not increase their product's marketability, so it's not that important.

    OTOH, a good build process is essential to an Open Source product. If it's difficult to build, you won't have many users.

  • PDF ("the acrobat format") is effectively declarative PostScript. It allows for totally precise, resolution-independent page layout -- an absolute necessity for real printing. It's megayears ahead of HTML in that respect.

  • Why Adobe should OS PostScript; a memetic view (Score:4)

    by acb ( 2797 ) on Monday July 26, 1999 @04:17AM (#1784462) Homepage
    If Adobe want to join the open source movement, the obvious places to start would be infrastructure code; technologies, languages, libraries. And the obvious first target in Adobe's case would be PostScript, or parts thereof.

    Think about it; if they released a basic Display PostScript implementation (or the code necessary to immediately integrate Ghostscript into XFree86), X users on Linux (and the BSDs) would immediately have access to Display PostScript. The DPS imaging model, being free, would become part of the environment, whose existence could be assumed by any developer. This would ensure the success of Adobe's model of imaging on X, and if Adobe did it first, there'd be less incentive for OSS developers to get involved in rival companies' models.

    And if an (open-source) PostScript-based system becomes the de facto standard, that would give Adobe an advantage in porting their applications, which presumably share the same philosophy more closely.

    If a general-purpose PostScript library (or set of libraries, for the imaging model, the language, and so forth) were released, perhaps under a similar licence to Netscape's JavaScript, it would definitely find a home in many projects.

    Adobe would stand to lose very little; PostScript itself is a fairly old technology, and while coding an implementation is laborious (due to its size), it is not exactly secret-weapon material.

    The standards game is not about intellectual property, but about memes; about getting your memes into the ideosphere, and helping them spread as far and wide as possible. Open-source technologies make far more fecund memes than equivalent proprietary, or semi-proprietary, ones; distibutable, usable code helps them spread like wildfire. And an open-source PostScript kit would make PostScript a killer meme, and quite probably the standard in its fields. Which would be good news for PostScript and good news for Adobe's related technologies.
  • I'm not sure what to make of the article; there's not much substance to it.

    I do know that Adobe will not port Acrobat 4 (the full package, distiller, etc) to Unix. There is a small chance that a Solaris port might appear, but only if Sun pays Adobe for it.

    Adobe's idea for open source might have been revealed at a recent seminar in London. In it, Adobe representatives suggested that they'd be expecting people to license a 'standard' PDF generation library from Adobe, as they were concerned that it's possible to write a PDF that conforms to the specification in the manual, but that won't work with Adobe PDF tools. (For examples of this, apparently pdfTeX produces math output that occasionally won't render in Acrobat Reader 4.)

    So they've basically conceded in public that PDF isn't the cure-all to the problems of bad PostScript. They might try to license their PDF generation library under some mutant community licence to get other people to do the hard work of porting the code, and Adobe to control the returns. Nice work if you can get it.
  • Regarding the GIMP's interface: It's different. It feels strange to PS users. That doesn't mean it's worse. In fact, there are a couple of things that I've wanted to do in PhotoShop that are done in such unintuitive ways that I've ended up calling for help and then shaking my head in bewilderment afterwards. These are things that seemed perfectly natural in the Gimp. Then again, I use these products once a month at most (I'm definitely not an artist) so I don't know how each grows on as you gain experience.
    --

  • This post is back up from -1. Why was it scored down?

    Random words and phrases running around my head:

    • censorship
    • abuse
    • knee-jerk
    • tolerance
    • understanding
    • splinter
    • neighbor's eye
    • sterile
    • overzealous
    • freedom of expression

    --
  • Yep. You heard it here first. Linux is used at Adobe. Actually, they've had at least a few linux servers for a couple years, although I have No Idea how extensive things are now. Any AC's want to chime in?

    BTW: that "500 jobs" thing he mentioned included mine. Ouch. No hard feelings though, nice severance package. Start-ups can be a Good Thing, even when they're "Start-overs".

    Maybe now they'll port some of their server-side Acrobat code. *HINT HINT*

    --PDF Guy
  • "I want to pay for an operating system from a vendor with a contractual relationship that gives me recourse if things go wrong," Warnock said.
    What OS does he think you can buy under a contractual relationship that gives him recourse? I quote from Microsoft's warranty for the OEM edition of Windows 98 as shipped with a Dell computer:
    LIMITED WARRANTY. PC Manufacturer warrants that (a) the SOFTWARE will perform substantially in accordance with the accompanying written materials for a period of ninety (90) days from the date of receipt, [...]
    So MS does in fact provide a warranty on the software, unlike many things for which you only get a warranty on the physical media. But the "accompanying written materials" consists only of a very slim booklet giving only the most general tutorial on the simplest features of the system. If anything more complicated is wrong, you're out of luck.

    Suppose that you do have occasion to bring a warranty claim. Is Microsoft (or Dell) obliged to fix the problem? Heck no:

    CUSTOMER REMEDIES. PC Manufacturer's and it's suppliers' entire liability and your exclusive remedy shall be, at the PC Manufacturer's option, either (a) return of the price paid, or (b) repair and replacement of the SOFTWARE or hardware that does not meet this Limited Warranty and which is returned to PC Manufacturer with a copy of your receipt.
    I can't see where Warnock can really claim to have any substantive recourse with commercial software; AFAIK few if any OS vendors offer any better warranty than does Microsoft.

    So in what way is the recourse with Linux any worse? If he acquires Linux over the net, at no charge, he has exactly the same option of getting a refund of the full price he paid for it, or a fix if the developers or community provide one. Exactly the same situation with MS, where MS gets to choose whether to refund the purchase price or provide a fix. MS's choice, not Warnock's. And even if he buys a commercially packaged Linux distribution, there are several that he can choose that offer a money-back guarantee.

    The "contractual obligation of vendor" and "legal recourse" claims are widely cited as a problem with Free Software (or Open Source software, or ...), but these claims are entirely without merit. It's a FUD tactic, plain and simple, and it's very disingeneous of Warnock to repeat such nonsense.

  • Be careful not to misinterpret what he's saying. He's saying that it's not feasible for them to make their own messy code public. He is not saying that it's not feasible to write a program like that.

    I can relate to him. I do design work on a great program that has an ugly build interface. You must spend a lot of time getting to know it before you can be productive.

  • What's so hard about typing:

    make UNIX_CAN_BUILD_STATIC=0

    ?

    -- Dirt Road

  • There's a difference between attacking, and explaining what I think is wrong, so that we can make it better.

    Isn't that what Open Source is all about? Everyone can have a say, everyone can help, making the final product better than any paid design team could possibly produce?

    --

  • ZDNet: Is InDesign a Quark Killer?
    Warnock: Well, maybe.
    ZDNet: Is InDesign a Quark Killer?
    Warnock: I said, maybe.
    ZDNet: Is InDesign a Quark Killer?
    Warnock: Yes.
    ZDNet: Is InDesign a Quark Killer?
    Warnock: I just said, yes.
    ZDNet: Is InDesign a Quark Killer?
    Warnock: Will you stop asking me that?
    ...

    What was the deal there, or am I just crazy?
  • GIMP is fine for web graphics, and a nicely evolving tool. BUT, print professionals will not take the GIMP seriously until it has some standardized color controls and some DTP equivalents to Quark or Pagemaker or Framemaker. Photoshop is only one part of the creative process for print work, and until you can use all the tools you need on one platform, the GIMP and other Linux tools will languish in the hands of those determined to use them, not the masses of creative professionals.


    Another thing, GIMP is fine for pixel graphics, but there is nothing on Linux for vector art. The vast majority of my art creation (illustrations, schematics) are done in Freehand and sometimes Illustrator. Without those tools available on Linux, i'm staying with the Mac.


    a third thing, it's not just creating graphics, it's getting them printed (still assuming print work here, which won't die in the face of web graphics, ya know), even if you get all 3 parts of print production on Linux (vector, pixel and layout tools), you need Linux-savvy service bureaus who can take thos wacky file formats and make them RIP like regular files.


    oh, and the beautiful thing about pdf is that you can do ANY kind of layout work and make it a pdf. Take your average high-quality design and convert it to HTML and it'll look like your average drone with FrontPage did it. HTML was never meant for high quality work. A pdf can be used for the web, for print, for onscreen navigating, all within the same file. it's a beautiful, beautiful thing, and IMHO the best product Adobe's come up with since Postscript.


    - jub, graphics professional, thank you very much.

  • This isn't USENET. Freedom of speach doesn't apply and it shouldn't.
  • Of course Adobe don't care about Open Source!
    They care about making money. If they can do that through Open Source, they will do. If they can't, they won't.

    Why should they care about Open Source?
  • I talked to Adobe representatives at JavaOne. They were showing a PDF reader written in Java.

    I think open sourcing this would be a good start if they were serious about open source; there are lots of useful, new applications of Adobe's PDF protocol that that would enable.

    The response was disappointing. Even though they said they weren't making any money on PDF readers, the stated that it was very unlikely that they would open source it. They also seemed fairly bearish on the outlook of the company as a whole.

    We should be fairly happy that Adobe at least publishes reasonably usable PostScript and PDF specifications eventually. Unless they have a big change of heart (or get taken over), I don't see a lot more coming out of that company.

  • There is a beta available of the Gimp for Win32.

    http://www.gimp.org/~tml/gimp/win32/

    The latest snapshot is dated 19990726. This has been a very stable release for me. I guess it needs a little more publicity. Zach!

    Brian
  • You mean GIMP ?? Get real ... Photoshop is years ahead of GIMP both in features and user interface ( which is just as importand.)

    It was recently explained to me by profesional in this field - really, I thought GIMP was just as good and it is not, not by a long shot.
  • "Would we put up the source code for Photoshop?" Warnock said. "Not in a million years. ... Well, maybe sometime in the future. But something like that is so horrendously complex, it is just not feasible -- the build mechanics are just too horrendous. But sure, if we needed help and the open-source community could provide it, absolutely."

    That's very nice of him to say that.
    They appreciate Open Source, because then people will do the job for them.
    God, I'm eager to do their job and not be paid while they make money of it.

    If I want to work on an Open Source Image Manipulation Program, I'll work on the Gimp.

    Besides that, I think a good strategy for them is to work with BeOS.
    If Be declared themselves as the media OS, I'm sure they can use Adobe's products, and vice versa.
    Currently they don't even have "Acrobat reader" for BeOS....


    ---
    The day Microsoft makes something that doesn't suck,
  • I would assume that this is because the entire world downloads Acrobat Reader, but I don't see why anybody would want to have a "My Adobe" account. Why would they put world news up on a site like that? I mean, thousands of people going to the site to download acrobat and they're going to actually try to clog up the site with completely irrelevant information that makes it harder to navigate? Where's the logic in that?

    And Adobe isn't really a consumer-oriented company, and won't be as long as its good programs are like $500. Maybe they're going to have a "graphics-artist-only portal".

    As for GoLive being the preferred product on the Mac, I've gotta say that it really sucks. Maybe I have a bum copy or something, but I tried it out a couple of days ago and it saved every HTML file with 0 bytes. Even the crappy documentation files that came with the program: blank. Luckily I had backup copies...
  • Ok, let me revise my remarks on GoLive. After speaking with someone at Adobe I discovered that it was not the program that sucked, but my computer. My poor PM7300/180 with 32 mb ram wasn't up to snuff and was giving me the bizarre zero-file-length errors. After trying it on a nice Lime iMac, it worked great.
  • Since when does buying a piece of software from a company establish a contractual obligation to make the software work? Hasn't Mr. Warnock ever read a shrink wrap license? Good god!
  • You're comparing apples and lemons here. Yes, pdf/ps keeps layout, html doesn't. But that doesn't mean pdf is /ahead/ of html. HTML was never meant to keep exact layout (AFAIK). HTML does what it was meant to do, (Badly, I must admit, because of the 'extensions', but not due to exact layout issues), and pdf/ps does it's thing.
  • Actions speak louder than words ....

    SGI and IBM have demonstrated their belief in OpenSource by releasing quite sizeable pieces of code and/or APIs. If and when Adobe does the same, then they might have some street credibility, especially in getting the community to port stuff like pdf converters to smaller platforms.

    By the way, despite people's attachment to GIMP as a toy, Adobe have quite a prescence among commercial professional typesetting/publishing hardware that will never be replicated by the hacker community in the immediate future. This automated desktop-to-printing press market is worth some serious bikkies and I doubt whether anyone commercial vendor is going to abandon this gold mine. A serious stoush between Xerox, Cannon, and the document/image specialists might cause a market ruckus before things get standardised (funny how each digital camera manufacturer is pushing their favourite image format).

    The real question is whether postscript or pdf is an appropriate file format to store digital documents/images for the long-term. TeX is probably the closest equivalent (even still used in scientific publishing) but it is not really a typesetting language. I won't mention Word which seems to come out differently on different configurations and framemaker SGML is rather complex for the average joe. XML is a simplified version designed for Web publishing but does it have the same richness suitable for paper publishing? It would be nice to be able to retrieve and view documents 50 years down the track after PCs have been replaced by whatever gee-whiz vr hype that will be the marketing ploy of the decade. :-)

    One possibility is the Simple Document Format
    (http://www.mincom.com/mtr/sdf/) which separates somewhat the content and the formatting engines but I'm sure there's better alternatives. Any suggestions?

    LL
  • Man, childish is right. I think that rather than take potshots at another company, a little analysis of how it is that it became conceivable that Quark would buy out Adobe "with Adobe's own money" might be a better idea. I mean, from the sound of it, they got lucky that Quark botched the buyout, and otherwise it would be "Quark Photoshop" now.

    Otherwise, I think this is basically a puff piece. Bleah-puff.
  • It seems to me that companies are thinking about opensource as a way to take a product and get rid of it. They say, "here opensource people we gave you this now fix it up for us," which just isn't good. They want us to act as free labor for them, so they can then repackae the work from the community and ship it as a product. They also want to just have us support everything. They are saying, "we don't need tech support now, the opensource people will take care of that." This is something that I feel should be stoped right now, we need to really examine companies when they are thinking about going opensource to see if they are just going to attempt to use us as cheap labor, or acutaly give something to the community and contribute in a meaningfull way.


    (All spelling mistakes are mine alone, and no one elses ;P)
  • You would be correct that IMHO overall GIMP is not as good as Photoshop, but I don't think the gap is all that large.

    Most of the really groundbreaking tools in Photoshop (the amazing time saving magnetic tools) only came about in the last release.

    GIMP was much better at any kind of scripting until Photoshop 5.0 came out.

    For about 90% of Photoshop users GIMP would be a viable alternative. I haven't used GIMP very long and haven't had a chance to look for things like layer settings, etc, but don't count GIMP out. I think some of the gripes that people have with PS vs. GIMP will be/are being addressed in the develoment versions and GIMP is VERY extensible and if there's something you want, code it or beg for someone else to code it.

    Skippy
  • print professionals will not take the GIMP seriously until it has some standardized color controls
    Hear! Hear! So true. I'd use Win32 GIMP instead of PS if it had any kind of color matching support. I agree that its too much trouble to switch OS's for one portion of a design process.

    As for vector art, you are correct and the person who said KIllustrator has evidently never used Freehand or Illustrator. GIMP is a viable alternative to Photoshop (if you aren't worried about color matching) but NONE of the free software vector programs are even close to their proprietary counterparts.

    As for wacky formats, there's no reason you should have to worry about them or use them. There's Postscript support (I think) for Linux. I usually send either postscript or .pdf to my printers. Its much easier than having to deal with missing fonts/graphics/Quark plugins etc. You have to do it right, but some places will give you a discount for ready-to-RIP postscript. Saves them time and money. BTW, what constitutes a "regular" file? Service bureaus already have to deal with just about every wacky format and media on the planet, what's a couple more?

    Hmmm. On a Mac maybe you can make a .pdf out of anything because postscript support is built into the OS. It's not always so easy on a PC. There are still shitty PC programs that insist on their own print drivers and other goofiness that can prevent the creation of postscript which can be converted to .pdf.

    Take your average high-quality design and convert it to HTML and it'll look like your average drone with FrontPage did it. HTML was never meant for high quality work.
    If it looks that good. Frontpage SUCKS ASS for HTML design, but export from page layout programs suck even more. HTML was never meant for high-quality STATIC work. That doesn't mean that in its own medium that high-quality work is impossible. Using HTML for static print page layout is using the wrong tool for the job, but it doesn't mean you have a crappy tool.

    Skippy, former Kinkoid and still graphics semi-pro, thank you very much
  • I couldn't in the time of my life understand the acrobat format. The size is 3 time of the zipped html files. Any one care to explain that to me?

    Quite simply, PDF is a binary format that preserves exact layout - HTML can't do that. You use a HTML file when you want to get something across with minimal fuss, and a PDF file when you want exact layout to be displayed, such as a book/magazine/advertisement/etc.

    Adam J
    TSS Productions [html.com]

  • Ok, it's popular, but...


    "On the Mac platform, GoLive is the preferred product.."


    He meant to say "BBEdit" there. As long as GoLive continues to muck with the html, people will need BBEdit (or your favorite text editor) to clean it up.
  • It seems ludicrous for Adobe to even hint at OpenSource when they have the entire protocol for their consumer grade printer language locked up beyond the reach of the OpenSource community.

    Lets see a nice fat PDF document describing the PrintGear imaging model and network protocol so we can have cheap high quality printers for OpenSource systems. Until Adobe provides that information they are just a barrier to transition.

  • Would we put up the source code for Photoshop?" Warnock said. "Not in a million years. ... Well, maybe sometime in the future. But something like that is so horrendously complex, it is just not feasible...

    Um, GIMP, anyone? TIFFany? As if open source developers are somehow too stupid to figure out a graphics program...besides, don'tcha think those very same developers could actually clean up the mess that Photoshop is?

    "I think organizations like Quark, who are fiercely proprietary, will suffer at the hands of those who use open standards and invite help from the open source community."

    Exactomundo, mon cher suit-o-rama. And not releasing the code of your products means you are just as proprietary as Quark.

    "I want to pay for an operating system from a vendor with a contractual relationship that gives me recourse if things go wrong," Warnock said.

    So...in other words, you believe open source is good, but not good enough for Adobe to actually use. Linux not good enough? Just because it's FREE? Besides, all you have to do is get Linux from Red Hat, SuSE, TurboLinux or whatever, and voila, you have someone to scream at. If you're desperate, maybe you can drop Linus a line on Usenet.

    I have grown to despise Quark--way too expensive, and when was the last time we say a truly *significant* upgrade?--but Adobe just went down about 1000 notches on my scale.

    If you're going to be proprietary, at least be honest about it. Don't try act like you're a big fan of open source...and then slam one of its crown jewels.

    Ethelred [surf.to]

  • Apperantly every company - however unrelated to web content is trying to jump on the portal bandwagon.

    Those pesky "make us you homepage" buttons are everywhere. (including in a site of a router producing company!)

    Well, buzz words like "portal" and "open source" allways do strange things to the commercial world.

  • I used to think CMYK was irrelevant for most people, especially those who weren't preparing images for four-color offset printing.

    Then I read Dan Margulis [ledet.com]'s fantastic book, Professional Photoshop 5: The Classic Guide to Color Correction. Although it uses "Photoshop" in the title, it's hardly Photoshop-specific, and is mostly about how to apply Curves and blend channels to color correct and repair photographs. (A few chapters are available on his website). In any case, one certainly gets an understanding of what image editing tools are important for professional graphic artists.

    The point is this: there are many color corrections and photograph repairs which are difficult, if not impossible, to correct without the ability to switch to CMYK (and CIELab also).

    The difficulty with CMYK and CIELab is that the channel definitions change, but the image itself must still be displayed in RGB (unless someone invents a CIELab/CMYK monitor). So its a bit more difficult than writing a snazzy special effects filter, but on the other hand I can imagine that someday Gimp could even go beyond Photoshop with fully configurable and user-specified color models (e.g. Margulis's theoretical Cyan-Magenta-Yellow-Tangerine).
  • I used to think CMYK was irrelevant for most people, especially those who weren't preparing images for four-color offset printing.

    Then I read Dan Margulis [ledet.com]'s fantastic book, Professional Photoshop 5: The Classic Guide to Color Correction. Although it uses "Photoshop" in the title, it's hardly Photoshop-specific, and is mostly about how to apply Curves and blend channels to color correct and repair photographs. (A few chapters are available on his website). In any case, one certainly gets an understanding of what image editing tools are important for professional graphic artists.

    The point is this: there are many color corrections and photograph repairs which are difficult, if not impossible, to correct without the ability to switch to CMYK (and CIELab also).

    The difficulty with CMYK and CIELab is that the channel definitions change, but the image itself must still be displayed in RGB (unless someone invents a CIELab/CMYK monitor). So its a bit more difficult than writing a snazzy special effects filter, but on the other hand I can imagine that someday Gimp could even go beyond Photoshop with fully configurable and user-specified color models (e.g. Margulis's theoretical Cyan-Magenta-Yellow-Tangerine).
  • Macromedia is already kicking Adobe's ass pretty good, with the sane price too. Adobe is the last company that will "Get it." Another offtopic thing, I couldn't in the time of my life understand the acrobat format. The size is 3 time of the zipped html files. Any one care to explain that to me?



    cy

  • This is not what Open Source is for. (Score:4)

    by nevets ( 39138 ) on Monday July 26, 1999 @03:55AM (#1784496) Homepage Journal
    I'm sorry, but I'm tired of hearing about Corporate Execs saying we will go open source and everything will be better.

    Open Source is a community. You don't just say "here, go do this" and everyone jumps up and does your work. Its been mentioned before, that programmers like to program on things they enjoy. If Adobe opens its source for the benefit of others and not just for themselves then you might get help.

    Open Source works best when you both produce the code and the support. Others will send you bugs (and maybe if you're lucky at patch as well) so you product becomes better quality. And as the prime resource for the product, you will also be the prime supporter companies will choose. Thus, making Open Source a money maker. You can also market your product as something that will ALWAYS be supported because it IS open.

    Warnock looks like he's trying to pillage the Open Source community. I always welcome Companies into this community, but at least for the right reasons. I know they are out to make money, but they must give back as well.


  • I've seen plenty of anti-adobe posts in response to this article. Why are they getting so much flak? I understand that they may be a bit naïve about the open source community, and that GIMP is a wonderful standin for Photoshop, but here are a few things to consider:

    • For those of us who are forced to use Windows in the workplace, Photoshop is just about the best tool there is for graphics, with pretty good tech support, and it's becoming more extensible and scriptable with each release. That's a good thing. GIMP may be great for those who have access to Linux, but the truth is not everyone does. Photoshop (and Illustrator) represent solid reliable tools for plenty of folks, and that should inspire some respect for Adobe.

    • Adobe is actually putting money into the open source community for implementing XSL, which is a standard that will be helpful not just for Adobe, but for everyone who uses XML (read: the whole web community in the near-ish future). While they may be driving a standard that they will embrace, they certainly won't control it, and I'd say the overall effect for the online community will be positive.

    • Adobe, while maybe unfamiliar with the open source culture, has put forth a lot of effort in developing open (and non-open) industry standards. Postscript is as good an example as any of such a standard -- and free tools like ghostscript are available for sharing information between folks. Check out the SVG (scalable vector graphics) specification at the W3C [w3.org], you'll see that a couple of the authors of the document come from Adobe. Standards like SVG and Postscript are good for industry because they prevent people like Microsoft and Macromedia from sneaking in and making their own propriatary standards.

    To conclude: yes, GIMP is pretty damn nifty. No, Adobe doesn't have all the clues about open source. But they are pretty good at what they do, and even if you never use photoshop, chances are you can still benefit from Adobe's work.

  • Would we put up the source code for Photoshop?" Warnock said. "Not in a million years. ... Well, maybe sometime in the future. But something like that is so horrendously complex, it is just not feasible...

    Um, GIMP, anyone? TIFFany? As if open source developers are somehow too stupid to figure out a graphics program...besides, don'tcha think those very same developers could actually clean up the mess that Photoshop is?

    Let me throw in a little bit of reality, which a lot of people don't understand (and which I didn't believe until I was forcibly exposed to it!).

    Software development in industry is more chaotic than you probably imagine. I work for one of the biggest software/hardware companies in the world. I was recently involved in a development project that cost millions of dollars to produce, and consisted of over 1 million lines of code. The company invested years of development effort into this system - it was a high profile, highly important product to us.

    At one point, I needed to build a modified version of the product. I grabbed the full source code, and attempted to build it. I couldn't. I enlisted the help of local experts. They couldn't make it build. We enlisted the help of the team in charge of product builds. They could build it *in their own environment*, *on their own machiens* - but they had *no clue* of how to build it elsewhere, or what the environment dependencies that affected the build were.

    There is *no one* in the company who understands the entire build process. There's a group of guys who each understand small pieces of it, and they've cobbled together a combination of lots of little makefiles bound together by kludgy perl scripts.

    I'll bet that Photoshop is very much the same way. I'll bet that no one at Adobe has the slightest clue of how to build the entire system.

    So. If Photoshop were ever opensourced, it would disappear in the blink of an eye, because no one would be able to build it. Would open-source hackers really spends months of effort fixing a fundamentally broken build process on a proprietary project, when they could invest their time doing useful things to an opensource competitor like GIMP? I really don't think so.

  • Seeing as Adobe is now located in the center of the universe (TM), the Fremont neighborhood of Seattle, you'd think they'd get with the locals and push Linux tools.

    Will in Seattle

  • PDF (Score:1)

    by badben ( 45336 )
    • Webdesign is not made with Quark and then converted to HTML. Webdesign is completely different from printdesign.
    • For printdesign, we have PS.
    Sure, Linux lacks professional layout tools.

  • Linux at Adobe? I just want Adobe on Linux! (Score:3)

    by Tackhead ( 54550 ) on Monday July 26, 1999 @05:15AM (#1784501)
    Let's see here...
    • FrameMaker. "If there's doc to be written, we wanna write it - but we won't port our most powerful documentation-creation platform to Linux."
    • Acrobat. "We want everyone to use PDF. We've got Acrobat reader for every platform under the sun, but the only platform for which we support the creation of PDF is Windoze and Mac. (For Acrobat Capture, it's Windoze only). Run any kind of UNIX - proprietary or open-source - and wanna create PDF? Forget it!"
    So, let me get this straight. "We support open source, but our authoring tools are only available on a few proprietary UNIX platforms, definitely not on Linux, and our notion of a cross-platform output format can be viewed on anything, but only created on a PC or Mac."

    If that's "supporting" open source, I think I prefer Bill Gates' way of supporting open source.

    FrameMaker is great. I love it. I've used it daily on both a Sun box an an SGI. Why there, and not on a Windoze box? Because Frame has strong scripting and automation capabilities that make it the ideal doc-producing platform in a UNIX environment. (Ironically, these capabilites are largely lacking in the Windoze version of Frame.)

    PDF is great. I'd love to be able to publish in it. I'd love to extend my Frame production scripts to produce stuff in PDF as well as PostScript. But hey, I've only got a lowly UNIX box, not one of those spiffy NT things that can create PDF.

    Wake up, Adobe. If you really want your products used "wherever something needs to be documented", port your products to Linux. I'd have a had much easier time convincing my employers to spring for FrameMaker if I could have told him it ran on a white-box PC running Linux, rather than a Sun workstation. Telling them that in addition to the pricey workstation, they also need a white-box PC running Windoze in order for me to generate PDF doesn't help.

  • I disagree. I am a web developer who uses both. I use Gimp at home in Linux, and I use Photoshop in Win32 also at home. At work, I use Gimp for Win32. I have been using Photoshop for a couple of years and Gimp for a little over one.

    I prefer to use Gimp for a few reasons. One, it loads faster and is stabler on BOTH Win32 and Linux. Thats says much because the Win32 port is a developer version. Two, I can use it on both platforms that I work and play on. Three, I can DL Gimp and rock away, as well as give it to other web devs and not have to pay a dime. Try that with Photoshop.

    Don't get me wrong. Photoshop is a great product, but to so seriously discredit Gimp without any merit is counterproductive.

    As per this article, my respect for Adobe is almost nill. Their CEO views open source as a tool to help them when time and time again there have been requests for a port, even a commercial port, for Photoshop. Why should I use Photoshop when Gimp is almost as good and is far more flexible? Gimp can even read Photoshop-native files! So I now don't care for Adobe, and wouldn't pay for their software regardless of the platform it runs on.
    -Clump
  • Adobe is actually putting money into the open source community for implementing XSL, which is a standard that will be helpful not just for Adobe, but for everyone who uses XML (read: the whole web community in the near-ish future). While they may be driving a standard that they will embrace, they certainly won't control it, and I'd say the overall effect for the online community will be positive.
    W3C's XSL page [w3.org] says the competition was cancelled on June 18. I've found no other reference to that anywhere, so I dont blame you for not knowing. For Warnick to claim credit and encourage developers to work on it, as he does in the interview, is truly cynical and corrupt.

    Zax

  • It does seem a bit lame--but look at the advertising dollars. Every Corp. out there is looking for ways to leverage their products and expertise into new revenue sources (or at least higher stock values), and the portal thing seems to have worked for many a company. Look at Real Systems, (the former) Netscape, Intuit--these software companies are/were making good money off of their huge websites. I'm not at all surprised to see Adobe doing this, and except that everything will obviously be biased towards their products, I can see it being a good resource for people looking for clipart, photos, tools, tips, tricks, books, etc.

  • Too bad adobe acrobat reader for linux is the uttermost piece of shit I have ever used.

    Not only is it ugly (motif). The rendering is so slow that the thing locked hard on me, blocking all input from the keyboard. This was trying to read a 200k pdf file on my 233 mmx. I ended up using xpdf, which was atleast usable.

    And for pdf files to be converted to html. I could not find any usable software to do this for free. And do the commercial ones produce clean html?

  • Now why is it that all these companies seem to have these shitty build processes and not the standard (at least GNU standard :-) ./configure ; make ; make install.

    Wouldn't they benefit from a simpler build process themselves?

    This warnock guy openly admits that Photoshop build process is shite! I feel deep down that I should not have any respect for a product who's build process is shite :P

    Most of the opensource software I use seem to have a very good/simple build process and documentation. In fact the only time I have run into some weirdness was with abiword, and with QT, and both are corporate stuff.

    Now. I probably could built those If I spent some more time on them, but I was put off initially and decided to not use any more time fiddling with them.

    I am not trying to say negative about abiword here, I like abiword from what I have seen off it but it seemed the build process was "nonstandard", I may offcourse also remember incorrectly.

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