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Adobe goes corporate open source against Ogg Theora

By | July 21, 2009, 5:51am PDT

Summary: The corporate nature of the Adobe effort is emphasized on this page, where it lists “plug-in partners” from the worlds of advertising, publishing, and analytics. Its goal is to drive the Adobe Flash platform. That means Adobe’s Open Video Player, code-named Strobe.

It may have been upstaged by Microsoft but Adobe’s strategy with its Open Source Media Framework looks very similar.

That strategy is to co-opt the term open source, make it corporate, and maintain dominance of the future.

Microsoft is supporting Linux tools so Linux can live in a Windows world, and Adobe is delivering an open source project so that open source, as a concept, can live in its world of corporate media.

At stake in this case is the standard for video in HTML 5.0. The World Wide Web consortium has a bias in favor of royalty-free, open source standards. While the H.264 codec had market dominance, it had no open source street cred.

The corporate nature of the Adobe effort is emphasized on this page, where it lists “plug-in partners” from the worlds of advertising, publishing, and analytics. Its goal is to drive the Adobe Flash platform. That means Adobe’s Open Video Player, code-named Strobe.

It has already achieved big success since HTML 5 stopped specifying Ogg Theora in June, meaning no codec is currently specified. Don’t say no is a big step on the way to saying yes to H.264.

In the standards war open source is a necessary coating. We will now see whether open source is just that, a cloak on corporate ambition, or a true bottom-up phenomenon driven by communities like Ogg Theora.

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Adobe Systems Inc., OGG, Open Source, Dana Blankenhorn

Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for 30 years, a tech freelancer since 1983.

Disclosure

Dana Blankenhorn

Dana Blankenhorn has been a journalist, writer and part-time futurist for over 30 years.

At the present moment I run only a personal blog in addition to my ZDNet open source blog.

DanaBlankenhorn.Com has the subtitle The War Against Oil. In the past I have used it to write about political history, e-commerce, personal matters, some ideas related to open source, and The World of Always On, which is the idea of using sensors, motes and RFID to turn WiFi links into platforms for applications which live in the air.

My IRA account at Schwab holds a few tech shares, most notably some Intel and Applied Materials, but there are no open source companies in it. I don’t even own any CBS stock.

Biography

Dana Blankenhorn

Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for nearly 25 years and has covered the online world professionally since 1985. He founded the Interactive Age Daily for CMP Media, and has written for the Chicago Tribune, Advertising Age's "NetMarketing" supplement, and dozens of other publications over the years.

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RE: Adobe goes corporate open source against Ogg Theora
gaberdiye03 Updated - 21st Jun
@johndrinkwater Using "Open Source Software" as a marketing term, any company can do that and seem to get away with it. That has always been a concern and now it is coming true. "Free Software" on the other hand actually pembe maske energy balance oyna oyunu moliva orjin krem tutune son nanomatik complex 41 new fx15allows users some rights to the source code, the software, the distribution of that software...

Free Software is the only model which can free us from this baloney that Adobe, MS, and other try to shove down the throats of semi-aware consumers
View in thread
0 Votes
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Absolutely, and it gets worse...
studmantra 21st Jul 2009
This is just Adobe PR trying to pre-empt a possible win by "rtmpdump" at the SourceForge / OSCON awards (to be announced on the 23rd).

For details on what Adobe *really* thinks about Open Source and Open Standards, read the message on the second half of this page: http://flazr.com
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Open Source is a con
lefty.crupps 21st Jul 2009
Using "Open Source Software" as a marketing term, any company can do that and seem to get away with it. That has always been a concern and now it is coming true. "Free Software" on the other hand actually allows users some rights to the source code, the software, the distribution of that software...

Free Software is the only model which can free us from this baloney that Adobe, MS, and other try to shove down the throats of semi-aware consumers.
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Proprietary formats are much more free...
CowLauncher 21st Jul 2009
to the user than than open source in some ways. Open
source has a lot of costs associated with it and in its
development and who is to say that once it gains traction
that its developers won't crawl out of the woodwork
demanding compensation? You can bet on it!

An ISO standard like H264 may have costs for those using
it to make money, but in that we gain quality,
performance, stability and interoperability. To me it beats
being at the mercy of frameworks like MS and ADOBE that
encapsulate ISO standards like H264 in their proprietary
special sauce or the cloudiness of open standards like
OGG.
0 Votes
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meh, FUD
johndrinkwater 21st Jul 2009
I?ll quote you randomally
?ISO standard? - some ISO standards are royalty free, so this is a red herring.

?H264 may have costs for those using it to make money?
It has costs for all uses, whether you?re trying to make money or not, MPEGLA have set viewing figures, time durations, etc, that determine your fees.

?but in that we gain quality?
A reasonable amount. Arguably not as much as we have gained over the last decade.

?performance? Theora has less decoding complexity, so it?s better performing.

?stability? er, what?

?interoperability? both codecs are well defined and have multiple installations - admittedly H.264 has more in this regard.

?To me it beats being at the mercy of frameworks like MS and ADOBE that encapsulate ISO standards like H264 in their proprietary special sauce? Did you actually visit the links? WMV this, silverlight that, Adobe etc...
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RE: Adobe goes corporate open source against Ogg Theora
gaberdiye03 Updated - 21st Jun
@johndrinkwater Using "Open Source Software" as a marketing term, any company can do that and seem to get away with it. That has always been a concern and now it is coming true. "Free Software" on the other hand actually pembe maske energy balance oyna oyunu moliva orjin krem tutune son nanomatik complex 41 new fx15allows users some rights to the source code, the software, the distribution of that software...

Free Software is the only model which can free us from this baloney that Adobe, MS, and other try to shove down the throats of semi-aware consumers
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Compensation?
NetArch. 21st Jul 2009
Open source has a lot of costs associated with it and in its development and who is to say that once it gains traction that its developers won't crawl out of the woodwork demanding compensation? You can bet on it!

You mean, something along the lines of an SCOg trying to say they owned all the intellectual property in Unix, and therefore Linux? Yeah, that went over like a lead balloon.

Or are you like some of the Moon Landing Hoax conspiracy buffs, and point to some cheesy website that claims "No Open Source programmer has a paying job - they all collect welfare"?

You are confusing open formats (open standards) with Open Source, something that Dana didn't highlight in the blog. But then again, he assumes his readers are perhaps intelligent enough to know the difference...
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RE: Adobe goes corporate open source against Ogg Theora
JohnHermansen 21st Jul 2009
It will be interesting to see how this plays out with Wikipedia selecting Ogg Theora as the codec to drive its video content. I wrote a blog on the topic just the other day (http://tiny.cc/YGeYR).
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RE: Adobe goes corporate open source against Ogg Theora
zakkiromi Updated - 17th May 2011
It has already achieved big success since HTML 5 stopped specifying Ogg Theora in June, meaning no codec is currently specified. Dont say no is a big step on the way to saying yes to H.264. k
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RE: Adobe goes corporate open source against Ogg Theora
edward polling Updated - 4th Jul
The corporate nature of the Adobe effort is emphasized on this page, where it lists plug-in partners from the worlds of advertising, publishing, and analytics. Its goal is to drive the Adobe Flash education news and platform. l

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