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Adobe to make largest ever source code donation to Mozilla

news.com.com — Adobe will contribute source code from its ActionScript Virtual Machine to the Mozilla Foundation. Mozilla will host a new open source project, called Tamarin, to accelerate the development of this standards-based approach for creating rich and engaging Web applications.

Who dugg this? Made popular Nov 7, 2006

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  • wild, on 10/12/2007, -1/+34Umm, they own it. They are tryng to improve it. God forbid they look to grow an investment.
  • bennybertow, on 10/12/2007, -5/+20They should also donate their SVG code...
  • inactive, on 10/12/2007, -4/+17wwwwwhhhhhoooooAAAAAAAAAAAAAtttt?
  • op12, on 10/12/2007, -1/+8Actually I'm seeing it on page 3 now, but the point still stands that the same story hit the frontpage only a few hours ago. I don't normally care about dupes, but that's a bit much.

    http://digg.com/tech_news/Adobe_and_Mozilla_Foundation_to_Open_Source_Flash_Player_Scripting_Engine
  • inactive, on 10/12/2007, -7/+12> we need to replace HTML entirely with something as precise as PostScript.

    This was tried in the 80s with Sun... it was called NeWS

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeWS

    It was pretty nice for the era of computing that we're talking about; the wikipedia article covers some of the reasons it flopped (that last reason, the NeWS and X11 merge, being the most important: NeWS made a computer run even slower than Emacs did... haha, I made a funny).

    These days... there are enough cycles available, fat buses, gigabytes of memory and plenty of bandwidth to re-perform the experiment; however, market conditions make it unlikely (it'll be a cold day in hell before Microsoft would let something like this see the light of day).

    Sometimes it's important to remember you only get one chance....
  • antdude, on 10/12/2007, -1/+7Nah, Flash!
  • makenai, on 10/12/2007, -2/+8I could be dim, but I thought that the largest ever source donation to the Mozilla foundation was the actual Mozilla source code from Netscape?
  • mcprogrammer, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4It's not a new standard. It's just a different virtual machine that supports just-in-time compilation for javascript. Initially, Firefox will still use the same parser and compiler, so the language will be exactly the same.
  • mdowney, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5What money?
  • comrade693, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3It is the second largest donation, with the first largest being the initial code donation.
  • realyst, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4Wow! For a company that traditionally had a reputation and habit for being a dick, they've really really been doing some good things of late.

    In the absence of true SVG adoption, this comes pretty damn close. In some ways, better, due to the fact that it follows a standard followed by IE as well. And ActionScript is pretty tight.

    Props to Adobe for this. Now maybe they can fix their Acrobat software and the fact that it takes longer to load then Photoshop CS2.
  • arnar, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Don't forget that today, Macromedia *is* Adobe, it's not as if Macromedia and all of it's people just disappeared.

    Capt. Picard was still Capt. Picard even when he was a Borg.
  • Glissy, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2"Capt. Picard was still Capt. Picard even when he was a Borg."

    Umm, no, he was "Locutus of Borg"...
  • warble, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3That's dumb. Even if you're Buddha, you're expecting some karma in return.
    Of course everyone expects somehting out of sharing. Whether it be money, personal satisfaction, or nirvana. Don't be a shtoop.
  • geminitojanus, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2"This was tried in the 80s with Sun... it was called NeWS"

    NeWS predated HTML by about 6 years or so. And it's not exactly the same either; NeWS is a backend for rendering, like Quartz or Cairo, that used PostScript as its model (the data internally was represented and drawn like a PostScript file). It was also a royal pain to write software on top of because of Sun's ability to overcomplicate any system (incompatible licensing, extensions to PostScript that didn't work well, etc). DisplayPostScript was a much better implementation from NeXT that went on to inspire DisplayPDF (which is what got rolled into what we know as Quartz).

    Replacing HTML has been a realm nobody has attempted to enter yet, because of the confusion it would cause. XHTML could be considered a replacement, but in reality it's more of an extension of the standard (an extension that allows an XML parser and DOM to understand HTML natively, encouraging more projects to use XML, instead of having to write an individual parser and DOM explicitly for HTML). In a sense, XHTML could revolutionize the way we deal with the web (by making it more accessible to more devices, printers, etc), but so far has completely failed to capture that goal (mainly due to the standard's complexity; no current browser renders XHTML data as XHTML, but instead understands and renders XHTML through its implicit understanding of HTML; it'll be huge news when someone claims an XHTML browser [one that only accepts XHTML and rejects HTML or uses a secondary DOM to model HTML]).
  • inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1It's a back door attempt to maintain their 98% of the browser market share...

    ...nothing less and nothing more.
  • funkpucker, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2Reciprocal Altruism - read up on it
  • macewan, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1it is helpful to view the karma as
    ‘cause and effect with action and intent.’
  • geminitojanus, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Adobe expects more people to develop Javascript/Actionscript in return for open sourcing an engine to make the languages run much, much quicker. This means entire user environments running in Javascript are possible, and while feeling as if they were native to the hardware.

    It was the smart thing to do. Not only does the engine get continuous attention from the Open Source community (being that it's now going to be a part of Firefox and many, many Mozilla-based projects), any speed improvements made to the engine directly affect the speed of their product, Flash. It also means that they can remove this element from future versions of the Flash plugin, and simply pass the bytecode directly to Tamarin, simplifying the number of Javascript interpreters needed in the Mozilla browsers (no longer does Flash need its own), making Flash run much faster.
  • geminitojanus, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1The first story was COMPLETELY INACCURATE: Adobe's code release has about as much to do with Flash as Javascript has to do with HTML (that is, it can be use with, but is not a part of).

    Tamarin is an ECMAScript 4 virtual machine. All it does is run ECMAScript 4 code, be it Javascript or Actionscript. In order to run that code, it has to be compiled (which is something Adobe /didn't/ Open Source, incredibly), but they intend to write a backend for SpiderMonkey that takes Javascript from there, and compiles it into bytecode that Tamarin understands (they also intend to write this backend completely in Javascript). There's a patch-set that gets this pass-through system somewhat working (I'm surprised it compiles, actually), but there's not a lot you can use it for now. Expect extensive development next year to turn this into an actual product (and likely increase both Firefox's and everyone else's Javascript code's speed dramatically). [It's important to note that Firefox is rendered with XUL and Javascript, any speed improvements to Javascript will also improve the speed of Firefox].
  • geminitojanus, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Why? The Open Source community's already got an implementation of SVG that's very nice, and getting better, librsgv.
  • spectre_25gt, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1For the download manager, do a search for downloadthemall. It works pretty well.
  • Lobster, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Good job Adobe.
    Action script is a powerful, solid language. Now it will be scrutinized and hopefully be open to further innovation and possibilities.
    This will benefit Adobe and Mozilla. Companies that support their user base will be supported. Those that create ill will, will find that people live longer than bad software companies. Power to the user.
  • JerodSlay, on 10/12/2007, -3/+3look about 6 stories down on the front page.
  • mfawcett, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0They have. http://opensource.adobe.com
    Link seems to be dead currently, but it is actively developed. Their Generic Image Library was just accepted to Boost - http://www.boost.org

  • AJDigg, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0True karma is just that.
  • Grimboy, on 10/12/2007, -2/+1Hey this is awesome. Now I can write shoddy javascript and it'll run fast on firefox. A JIT compiler means javascript is more of a real language as well. Seriously though, more responsive client side DOM scripts will be great.

    I think adobe are trying to un-"piss off" some of the people who macromedia pissed off. Specifically by making a big proprietary ***** that is flash.
  • inactive, on 10/12/2007, -4/+2I wish they would give some source from PhotoShop then maybe we could have a better version of GIMP.
  • inactive, on 10/12/2007, -4/+2I think they stated "largest ever for Adobe" and lol, yes a little dim
  • Guspaz, on 10/12/2007, -4/+1Enough is enough! We don't need MORE new standards supported in Firefox. Firefox sadly still has a tiny market share compared to IE, so any web standards supported by Firefox that aren't supported by IE won't be used by any decently large website. It's a waste of effort.

    Instead, how about support for additional protocols. A better FTP implementation would be a start. Or how about a download manager that properly supports resuming downloads?
  • inactive, on 10/12/2007, -6/+2I don't know about you, but I'd rather see them use that money to get people to work more and ship out a UB for their products.
  • macewan, on 10/12/2007, -5/+1Sharing is good Karma, but only if you are not expecting something in return.
  • MillenniumX, on 10/12/2007, -7/+2SVG, perhaps?
  • simoncoul, on 10/12/2007, -7/+1Dupe
  • amed, on 10/12/2007, -9/+2good for them, show should also Donate to the my account charity funds, heck we could all use the the extra lift
  • inactive, on 10/12/2007, -10/+1dugg for open source!
  • Supaman223, on 10/12/2007, -15/+2Sony Sucks, Microsoft sucks, Apple RULES!!!!!!!!!!
  • pizzaman, on 10/12/2007, -28/+5I hate how Adobe acts like they came up with actionscript ever since they got Macromedia.
  • inactive, on 10/12/2007, -32/+4Kind of interesting, despite the source. Anything that improves the pathetic hack that passes for page-description methods on the Web today should be promoted. Not that this tool is particularly well suited for that; we need to replace HTML entirely with something as precise as PostScript.

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