In recent releases, we’ve talked often about our goal to bring the team and technologies behind our web platform closer to the community of developers and other vendors who are also working to move the Web forward. This has been a driving motivation behind our emphasis on providing better developer tools, resources for cross-browser testing, and more ways than ever to interact with the “Project Spartan” team.
In the same spirit of openness, we’ve been making changes internally to allow other major Web entities to contribute to the growth of our platform, as well as to allow our team to give back to the Web. In the coming months we’ll be sharing some of these stories, beginning with today’s look at how Adobe’s Web Platform Team has helped us make key improvements for a more expressive Web experience in Windows 10.
Why don’t they just do it right from the get-go, bite the bullet, and release their new engine as open source? Why this kinda stuff where only big players get to maybe possibly contribute? What’s the point?
just read the Pwn2Own 2015 article and guess who is on top of the bug list?
If Adobe’s on board, I wonder if we’ll manually have to uncheck the ‘install CrapAfee’ option every time we update the app …
Adobe works hard for an open web… open to malware, of course
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Trolling aside, I don’t see the point of this kind of “crony openness”. Be open, or not, but stop the PR of “look, we are opening” when they are not.
You already have lots of open-sourced engines. Why do you need more ? Brave developers could contribute to Chromium if they wish and make it the extra-super-mega-iper-giga-tera-peta-browserlicious… browser for the Internet of coming centuries.
I can’t understand the whole point of complaining about anything
Open sourcing Trident would allow porting it to other OSes, so you could have a FreeBSD kiosk/VM running a Trident web browser in a jail for that one internal web app that still needs IE6, instead of keeping a 14 year old OS release wheezing along.
What kind of scenario is that ?
If the kiosk company had any interest in upgrading its product, it could have upgraded to a later Windows version / IE version. If they didn’t do that, why should they want to upgrade to FreeBSD ?
If they want to upgrade to FreeBSD, why do they need open-sourced Trident ?
I’m amazed that people seems to be considering open-sourcing “something” a magical bullet for everything. “Let’s open-source it and any problem will be fixed… !”
Because it’s MS
Their paranoid desire for lock-in just doesn’t end. They have to already realize that it’s a sickness, yet they do the same thing again and again. Let it go Bilbo, let it go…
Edited 2015-03-24 07:29 UTC
The problem with microsoft is that it still is mostly a software company. They will surely perceive releasing software as free as a big risk. Their cows are still software products, and as more and more software becomes free it will become harder and harder to charge big license fees.
I feel so well… I used to hate Microsoft long time ago (IMO they made personal computing booooring). Its been a long time since I don’t really care. It feels sooo good
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They don’t sell IE. But they fear that if they release it as open, they’ll lose lock-in leverage and control.
Maybe we’ll see better support for Phonegap/Cordova in VisualStudio?
There’s apparently a beta plugin for Phonegap dev in VS2013, but I haven’t checked it out yet, so maybe I’m hoping for something that already exists…
There is some explicit Cordova tooling in the VS 2015 community preview, but I’m not sure how good it is (haven’t actually played with it).
They are capitalists, who “own” their IP. It doesn’t make sense to give away a “competitive advantage” in capitalism, which is what Open Source does. Other companies are less ideologically driven, so they are happy to share when it’s in their benefit, or when it doesn’t benefit them to keep everything proprietary, or in the case of Google, when they are only doing a thing to undermine competition (you don’t see them open sourcing their search algorithm or their ad platform for example).
Companies like Adobe and Microsoft, and Apple to an extent have an interest in proving their model, the proprietary model, produces better results. It doesn’t, but they still need to try and prove it. I personally think that’s great. I said so a long time ago, if open source wants to profess to be better at a thing, they need to prove it too.
All that said, I think open source movements, which are largely democratic in nature (and when they aren’t they split – see IO.js vs. Node.js for example), need to work on the next step, which is democratizing the enterprise itself, and not just the code.
Definitely right.