Talking Open with Adobe's Dave McAllister

Filed under: Features, Adobe, DLS Interviews

Being "the guy" in charge of open source and standards at a company more known for its closed source products is a job I don't envy. Adobe's Dave McAllister, however, is a man that loves that kind of challenge and that's exactly the role he plays.

Dave's involvement in Open Source pre-dates the creation of the term itself. As a key member of the Silicon Graphics team in the early 1990s, he was involved in key OSS projects like OpenGL. McAllister also co-founded Cassatt and helped develop pioneering cloud computing solutions based on 37 open source projects.

When he was hired on by Adobe in 2006, McAllister went right to work, sitting down for a meeting with his new CTO and asking "When can I Open Source the Flash player?"

That hasn't been fully possible yet, due in no small part to the presence of technologies within Flash that Adobe must license from other vendors - like the h.264 codec. Flash player's foundations - things like the SWF, FLV, RTMP, AMF, and FlashCast specifications - are all published.

The Flex SDK, Blaze DS, and ActionScript virtual machine are also fully open source, and Adobe grants full patent use on all these things, which allows developers to go wild and produce cool things like the Pushbutton Game Engine. "If we can't open source the code," Dave told me, "we will open how it was built."

Continue reading Talking Open with Adobe's Dave McAllister

Talking Open with Adobe's Dave McAllister originally appeared on Download Squad on Fri, 03 Apr 2009 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments