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End of day at Adobe Engage – More Demos, Open Source

Things are winding down here with a Q&A of Kevin Lynch. Clearly, he’s someone who knows his, well, “stuff” as we’d say in front kids. As he gets asked questions, you can see that sort of look-up humming in his eyes and then that “ah, yes, there are several aspects to that…” where he reels off the list.

More Demos

The afternoon was full of demos, and I’m sure I’ll do some more “analysis” later. There was plenty of video stuff which, as I indicated in Twitter, I’m pretty much full-up on. The Yahoo! folks had some fun video stuff:

Yahoo! Video RIA

Yahoo! Video RIA

And then there were the Business Object guys with some RIA in the enterprise:

SAP/Business Object RIA

There were others, including SalesForce.com showing off their new Flex toolkit.

Open Sourcing

As ever, on the open sourcing Flash question, Adobe would love to further detail their knowledge of what people want with open source and why not being open source is barrier to adoption. At the end of the day, someone finally asked what the deal was (my phrasing), and Kevin Lynch trotted out the old “we want to maintain the stability of the Flash player” bit, which is fine. Sure. But, at some point, a platform gives that up and gets messy – or not messy if things go well.

Really, having watched Adobe for sometime on the open source issue: they’re close. They just need a few more internal battles (probably, I have no insight there) and then that leap of faith from the closed source mindset to the fully open one. I think they’ll find that controlling the commiter list is iron-fist enough to maintain platform stability.

Yes, it’s like that old joke, “and so the doctor said, ‘well, don’t do that.'”

Disclaimer: Adobe is a client and paid my T&E for this event.

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Categories: Conferences, Development Tools, Open Source.