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Getting the governance right

Adobe’s been working with open source long enough that it has learnt a lot about managing open projects. McAllister is aware of the many pitfalls, and tries to make sure that Adobe’s open source efforts avoid what he calls “the Netscape effect: let’s hand somebody thousands of lines of badly written code and assume the open source community is going to clean it up.” It’s also easier for Adobe to be involved with the process, when it’s just core technologies that are being opened up.

One of the newest open projects at Adobe is an open source media player framework, so you can build your own iPlayer – or go in a very different direction, like this 3D media sphere. McAllister is nothing if not realistic; "even though we’re three years into the process, we’re still learning". He freely admits problems last year with the Flex SDK community over the Flex 4 SDK (calling it 'a meltdown'). The company admitted it couldn’t completely align its direction with that of the community – but promised to give the community a lot more transparency. Adobe organised a series of open online meetings and the Flex SDK team now holds what McAllister describes as open iteration meetings, "points in the development process where we try to bring everybody in the project together: engineering, project management, product development. They’re now open so anyone can attend. We publish dates and we open Connect sessions". At these meetings anyone who wants to ask a question, or make a comment will be heard, and the engineer in charge of the feature in question has to answer.

There have been lessons learned on both sides. "We found our engineers who write in C++ don't understand developers who write in Flex. So we changed the development process". Similarly the process of submitting bugs was not well understood, so Adobe launched regular bug quashing weekends with the QA team and with the open source community. The first fixed over 200 bugs in two days.

McAllister believes "code speaks louder than email" and that led to Adobe opening up a sandbox for developers to show off new technology concepts. Developers can use this approach to build their whole idea, put it in a sandbox, and let Adobe engineers examine it in detail. The results aren’t too surprising; “We found people tend to have really bright ideas that shatter the rest of the code.”

There are other governance models. One McAllister describes as saying to developers and the community, "here’s some code". That’s how Adobe runs the XMP project, where almost nobody from outside Adobe adds anything – they just take XMP and translate it into other languages. It’s an approach McAllister calls "Open Code". Adobe guarantees code always will be available, but it will also evolve the code in line with its own products.

What’s next for Open Adobe

McAllister still points proudly at the PDF ISO standardisation; "From the time submitted to ISO to time approved it was 6 months - unbelievably fast for an ISO standard". Standardisation is generally slow, he says, and reduces innovation, as it defines things as they are at the point they were standardised. That wasn’t an issue for PDF, as most of the innovation had already moved beyond the document. It wasn’t an easy decision for Adobe, and took a lot of internal debate before the company was ready to hand over control of PDF to an external organisation.

The results of standardisation were good for PDF, with over 200 companies building businesses around the core specification, with hundreds of programs, both closed and open source. Even so, people still think Adobe owns PDF – and are also surprised that the standard isn’t free, as ISO owns the copyright and charges for access.

Open standards are the future for an open Adobe; "You can expect we'll do that again," McAllister promises, suggesting the next big standards project will be in the metadata space: "Metadata is probably the biggest single topic that everyone is trying to solve". Adobe’s XMP is the obvious target, and the first step will be some form of metadata consortium to turn it into the first piece of a standard. "We've been acting as a de facto standard organisation," says McAllister; "I think what will actually happen is we'll move to an actual standards body."

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