wabson on alfresco

Well done to John and John on the amazing article in the Guardian’s Technology section today. We made it onto page three!

Sadly the online version lacks the pretty pictures in the paper copy on my desk, but it’s a well-written piece, even if it does paint rather a depressing picture of Governmental take-up of open source in the UK.

I meant to write about this yesterday, but apparently trying to squeeze a week’s worth of work into four days prior to my day off today and fit in a trip to the gym meant I didn’t quite get round to doing so.

So Adobe have released Flex under the MPL, which is great news for the following reasons:

• Building rich web-based user interfaces sucks at the moment. Creating anything vaguely useful means working with a bunch of semi-related standards such as HTML, CSS, AJAX that between them just about manage to do what you want them to today. It’s a mess and we need a better solution.
• As Miguel commented on his blog, Microsoft have now consolidated their next-generation framework (now dubbed Silverlight) and I have no doubt that they will try hard to woo developers with this latest weapon in theirproprietary arsenal as they look to take over more and more of the web. Mozilla may finally be helping to claw back some of the browser share from M$, but if open standards can’t win the battle to define the technologies that are used to build the next generation of applications then we’re all in trouble. Unless you run Windows, of course.
• Having Adobe choose an open source license to release their code under provides further validation that this is a model that works for businesses. As if we needed that, though

Even more encouraging is Adobe’s promise that as well as releasing the source code under the MPL, they will allow others to contribute to this code. That’s when you start to get the full benefit of being an open source outfit, and Adobe have obviously twigged that.

There’s no mention of their Flash player in the release, the lack of a full open source implementation of the player obviously being a significant barrier to the take-up of Flash on Linux in particular, which will limit it’s usefulness on these platforms. Releasing this code under a similar license would no doubt win Adobe a lot more kudos in the open source community, but the Flex announcement will still be warmly welcomed by many. Maybe not by Mr Gates, though.

Could this be the beginning of the end for DRM? Steve Jobs surprises everyone by revealing that he wants rid of it. Or as ZDNet put it:

“You’ve got to hand it to Steve Jobs; he knows how to attract attention and how to deflect attention,� said James McQuivey, an analyst with Forrester Research. “He turned the whole European DRM question on its ear. ‘You want me to open up FairPlay? Well, I don’t even want FairPlay’.�

I think he needs educating on why MP3 and AAC are not open formats (even if you do put the word “open� in quotes) and his calling on all European citizens to protest to their local big evil record company does come across as a rather thinly veiled attempt to deflect the criticism that certain countries have directed towards Apple on the issue. But overall really encouraging.

The RIAA’s response to Jobs’ post was… Interesting. So interesting in fact that you have to wonder if they even read it through.

The Recording Industry Association of America, however, issued a statement interpreting Jobs’ letter as an offer to license the FairPlay technology. “Apple’s offer to license FairPlay to other technology companies is a welcome breakthrough and would be a real victory for fans, artists and labels. There have been many services seeking a licence to the Apple DRM. This would enable the interoperability that we have been urging for a very long time,� it said in an emailed statement.

Apple clearly have a lot still to do to actually convince the record companies that this is the right way forward, but clearly it’s a step in the right direction.