Adobe.com: Release Adobe Fireworks to Open Source | Hacker News Reader

Adobe.com: Release Adobe Fireworks to Open Source

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11 pointsdanboarder8 comments

It makes perfect sense to do this. If they're not continuing on with development they should either open source the code or sell it to someone who is willing to continue its development. Surely someone is interested in continuing on with the development of this amazing application?

There's still some probably non-significant value in them retaining FW for at least another year or two (after all, CS6 is still less than a year old).

As much sense as it seems to make, I would sooner see pig fly than something like that happen. Not counting the probable usual issue with code licenses.

They won't be able to do this, for the same reason they couldn't open source Flash - too much proprietary code and licenced stuff.

Flash is also a runtime for code and supports video decoding. Fireworks on the other hand is a utility application built around the PNG graphics format (which is not patented, but Adobe/Macromedia has extended it for Fireworks metadata).

But even if it is a more suitable candidate to open-source, I just don't think there's much in it for Adobe. It'll just cost a lot of money with the lawyers involved and the whole code-base will need to be reviewed.

yup, Adobe has been in the business of buying up competition for years. They aren't just going to give away a system that will take share away from their products.

That may or may not be true - they have open-sourced several large projects. Flex (http://www.adobe.com/products/flex.html), for example is a big software product that Adobe switched to open source in 2007.

From an article back then:

"Ward outlined the transition as having the following steps:

    Today - Creation of Mailing List for Discussion
    Summer 2007 - Public Bug Database and Daily Builds
    Second Half 2007 - Flex 3 Released
    December 2007 - Read Only SVN Access, Patches Welcome
    2008 - Committers with Write Access, Creation of Possible Subprojects "

see: http://www.infoq.com/news/2007/04/flex-open-source

and: http://readwrite.com/2007/04/26/adobe_takes_fle

They could do it like Google do with Chromium and Chrome.

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