How and Why Adobe is Making Open Source A Strategic Priority
In October 2018, Adobe ranked as the 16th largest corporate open source contributor (per Github data), moving up the list from our 32ndranking in 2017. One of the reasons for this growth came from the acquisition of Magento in June 2018 and its open source e-commerce platform. But this only tells part of the story. As of May 2019, we have climbed to 14thplace, and this ongoing improvement has nothing to do with vanity metrics and everything to do with a concerted internal efforts to free our employees to participate in open source development.
ROBERT STEELE I: I have always had positive feelings about Adobe but never seen it as central. This is a 1987 company, not a 21st Century company. The best thing it has done in recent years is make IRS tax returns both editable and savable. Google and Microsoft and Amazon are way ahead of Adobe in the open source game, and the prospects for Adobe doing a total make-over sufficient to save it before a new totally open source alternative comes along are near zero. My prediction: Amazon is going to cut a deal with Gimp or some other Adobe alternative, and Adobe will die within seven years — if Adobe does not crash before then.
ROBERT STEELE II: There are two reasons this matters:
01 The time has come to put Microsoft to death, particularly Office, which is so infected by backdoors as to be totally naked. No amount of “security” is every going to fix Microsoft. Sadly Adobe is also a security nightmare, think Flash and PDFs.
02 Data entry and the loss of historical data remains the choke point for accessing knowledge. We are still at 1% (processed) of 1% (collected) of 1% (published) of 1% (known). We need to get to 100%. Voice recognition, in its infancy still, will be part of that (in all languages). Open source will be a huge part of THAT.
I don't think Adobe will survive. The way is open for a completely new Web 3.0 that includes the four nested capabilities I have been talking about with Bill Binney and others, and that will, in essence, put all of these companies into the tar pit. In combination, #GoogleGestapo (Amazon, Facebook, Google, MeetUp, Twitter, YouTube and lesser others such as Reddit, Wikipedia, and WordPress) and these decrepit old companies (IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, and yes, Adobe) are a drag on the 21st Century. They need to be displaced.
See Especially:
2015 Robert Steele – Foreword to Stephen E. Arnold’s CyberOSINT: Next Generation Information Access
See Also:
Robert Steele: Healing the Self & Healing the World – The Open Source Way (Trump Revolution 14)
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