Hi all, I agree with Francis Hemsher. I read carefully that very good analysis by Jeff Schiller, along with Michael Bierman's responses. I agree with everyone else's observations and comments. I couldn't fail to notice that this situation is very unusual for me, meaning the fact that I agree with everybody. Then I quickly understood the reason: I, as an svg developer and fan, am in the same boat as everyone else, and that boat is sinking. It's only natural then that we would try to save our assets and belongings, having invested so much in terms of time, attention and passion. Reading the status reports on Mozilla, Evolgraphix and the rest, the picture is complete. The report on FF only confirms the impressions I had a few days ago, salvation is not going to come from there; as for the other actors, well, everybody read or knew already. So, I say to myself, how can we save the boat from sinking? One answer comes to my mind:
Adobe donates its ASV3 and 6 to the community as an Open project. I'm going to defend this absurdity and expose the advantages for everyone, including Adobe, point by point, but first let me ask anyone who has direct access to the Adobe Olympus to forward this open letter, as improbable as it may sound. I deliberately choose not to expose my points in a rational, ordinal fashion, but rather to use a free form style which is better suited to convey some of the more morally oriented messages. What is at stake is a form of art. The utilitarian aspect of SVG is to be compared to the utilitarian aspect of architecture. The architect uses artistic, as well as engineering, sciences and manipulates shapes, colors and textures to create, after all, places that humans use daily. Svg is about to reach maturity, and this scares. SVG was conceived as a free expression tool and was designed to respond to a growing demand for a form of expression that would give a relative, infant freedom to all those talents who were seeking to get "outside" the computer's cage, who were seeking the means to not only control the robot being borne in each machine language engine, but to be able to orchestrate its inherent forces. Adobe owns Flash. Big deal. That is probably the worst deal of the new born century. Has anyone ever been know for deliberately trading a comfortable and deserved image of avant-garde in computer arts, in exchange for, allow me, possessing a "vulgar" synthesizing instrument? I'll be unequivocal about that synthesizer, I saw the other day the new "movie" on the Adobe site. What kind of joke is that? It's so... démodé. So miserable. Is this serious? Kindergarten time should be over by now. Are we supposed to recede mentally to be able to all use flash? Where are we? Where do you guys want to take us? Did we cross millenaries of creation to end up with this? I refuse to be treated as stupid and others do too. Our kids' lives are being damaged by this type of things together with video games and poor rich multimedia content consumption. Declared forms of schizophrenia are increasing in number among the young population. Some disintoxication centers are starting to include computer addiction in their programs. I am graciously starting a work in SVG on schizophrenia, and then I see that. And I feel the rage against the machine, your machine, not mine. One can clearly see what type of public Adobe wants to target. There's a very appropriate French word for those, that you can't translate: "blaireaux". Adobe never belonged to that world and now, that has obviously become their aspiration. They've been hit by the mega corporation syndrome. I will eat oysters tonight and I might choke on one. Adobe's ceo might as well be eating oysters tonight on his yacht or anywhere he pleases, and he might choke on one. He'd be naked, there, with his oyster in his throat, just like anyone else; he'd be gasping for oxygen; he might think then about the oxygen he took away from us. Art stays, forever. Oysters and humans don't. If I were the head of the Italian Art and Culture department and if I were in the kind of mood that president Bush is in all the time, I would declare Adobe's ceo "terrorist of the arts and evil doer", and he would be forbidden of ever attempting to see the David or the Sistine Chapel. And he would also be forbidden to use the Botticelli's as Illustrator's logo. Corporative practices aren't any new. In the late Middle Ages things like the Hanseatic league were flourishing and in the Mediterranean there were more merchants than fish. The Wall street guys are choirboys compared to those folks. Yet those people gave incessantly to their cities development and to the Arts. Think of the Medicis. Do all the artist's names associated with them and the renaissance mean anything? Are there any idiots left who still think it's money that makes the world go round? Doesn't the Adobe CEO go to the theater, the movies? Doesn't he listen to music? Doesn't he have paintings in his office? Doesn't he have books in his library? Does he think books got written by spontaneous ink generation on blank pages? What would be of Adobe's ceo if he wasn't surrounded by all that, would he look at some flash movie? If he didn't choke on the oyster would he choose to see a Federico Fellini or Orson Welles or Marx brothers movie, or watch a flash "movie" for 2 hours? Shame on him. Shame on the one who killed SVG to sell flash. Posterity won't fail to pass judgment, and we don't fail either. If the World Art and Culture department existed and if I were the head of it, I would condemn Adobe's ceo to listen forever to a lousy piano bar musician playing ersatz music on a synthesizer while watching a flash movie, until death graciously delivers him. Adobe + flash - SVG = suicide. In the brilliantly idiotic move to try to counter XAML and whatever else on earth Microsoft will be getting out of the hat soon, Adobe is naively thinking that flash is a weapon. But Microsoft never feared flash, in fact they probably don't give a damn. IE7 unencumbered of a thorny SVG plugin in its side, Microsoft will only jubilate. What a gift! Thanks Adobe. On the other end heralding SVG means for Adobe the right to keep its aura for the cost of some development money with little or no incidence on the company's finances. Finances that were rightfully built on the revenues from the very first version of Illustrator. What we bought (I never did) was the spirit, independently of the tool. Adobe now sees as a smart move to renegade it's own spirit, without any need to do that, just out of sheer expansionism velleities. We don't have nothing to do of this Adobe. But of course, we know how greedy corporations can get, spending one penny on a thing that won't bring back dividends is out of the question. No investment for arts, no sustaining of the efforts to reduce spreading famine all over the world, no this, no that, except for tax return purposes. Nothing that doesn't bring in dividends. 'Cause corporation guys are smart guys, remember. They are the smartest guys on earth, didn't we know yet? They lead the world and conquer new markets. They are the smart guys. Pathetic. But, really, Adobe do not need to spend one penny if they feel it's so negative in terms of investment; they just simply need to: Donate the ASV project to the community to make it become an Open project. The dividends? The glory and the coherence with its own image in the case of donation or continued sponsoring. The blame of posterity in the case of the assassination of SVG. SVG has never hurt flash, not being in the same market and with a different public target. SVG does not target the "blaireaux", although it never brought any harm to them to be exposed to Art consumption. It's a false notion that the public is stupid. People are sensitive to nice things when they get a chance to discover them. Obscurantism has always been the prerogative of vile merchants and people's ignorance one of their fake arguments. Anyway, a very large part of the population seems to be eager to be kept in that pitiful passive consumer state. Adobe can always sell flash to that layer of the population. Adobe has a wonderful opportunity to embrace a mission, in coherence with the charismatic image it always had. Alternatively, by simply rejecting that mission it becomes an enemy of the arts and will inexorably loose that charismatic image. The word will spread and the spell will be cast, and it will loose its money up to the very last single tiny little penny and it shall live unhappily in guilt and with no oysters until the end of time. Domenico Strazzullo [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> Get Bzzzy! (real tools to help you find a job). Welcome to the Sweet Life. http://us.click.yahoo.com/KIlPFB/vlQLAA/TtwFAA/1U_rlB/TM --------------------------------------------------------------------~-> ----- To unsubscribe send a message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] -or- visit http://groups.yahoo.com/group/svg-developers and click "edit my membership" ---- Yahoo! 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