Coding Passion

I’ve been pushing this post around in my aggregator for some days now, never being able to read it, yet wanting to throw it away because it’s a nice article (and I love the picture they have included:) ) Chris Messina takes an in depth look at Adobes recent donation of Source Code to the Open Source Community (this is to be read as Mozilla).

On the other, more cynical, hand, I know enough to read between the lines and see this for what it really is: business as usual, with the good grace of open source being used as a context for making this appear “nicer” than it really is.

Adobe wants to be front and center in every browser; it’s smart enough to recognize however, that, like Google, the core threat to their position in the market is Microsoft’s Live platform technologies. An Adobe browser couldn’t dent Microsoft’s platform share, but two open source browsers can by creating the de facto web publishing environment and tools for the future of the web-centric desktop.

He definitely got a point in this theory, and maybe he got it all right (it certainly looks so), but the effect we have right now is that it is a bold move from Adobe, and it will help Standard compliant browsers to become more popular, thus making live easier for us developers. Making Business is not a bad thing as such, it’s bad if you are the only one who gets something, which is not the case here: we get a better user experience And god I love that picture