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Adobe sucks up to Oracle over FOSS boss gripes

Throw that man down a mine shaft!

Adobe has distanced itself from less-than-pretty comments made against Oracle by the Flash and Photoshop vendor’s open source boss.

As we reported earlier this week, Adobe’s open source and standards director David McAllister couldn’t resist hitting out at Larry Ellison’s firm, which earlier this year bought Sun Microsystems.

He said that Sun’s open source culture had been crushed by Oracle’s takeover of the database maker and claimed that Ellison’s company had replaced Microsoft as the open source community’s number one enemy.

McAllister said that “the axis of evil has shifted south about 850 miles or so” from Microsoft over to Oracle.

His comments followed the implosion of the OpenSolaris Governing Board, the members of which collectively resigned this week after Ellison canned development of the project in August.

However, McAllister’s paymaster has not welcomed his outspoken views.

An Adobe flack contacted The Register in an effort to distance the software maker from McAllister’s comments.

"Dave McAllister, Adobe’s Director of Open Source and Standards, posted a comment to the Open@Adobe blog that was critical of Oracle and its approach to open standards," said the company in an official statement.

"Dave’s point of view is his alone and does not represent the opinion of Adobe. Oracle is a valued partner and this blog post does not reflect our position on Oracle’s business strategy."

Of course Adobe's culture is probably much better aligned to that of Oracle's than, say, Sun under Scott McNealy. So it's no wonder that Adobe felt it necessary to issue its statement about 'Dave'.

The proprietary design software beast, like Microsoft, arguably pays only lip service to the open source cause.

Perhaps, in light of all that, Adobe should ask McAllister to join some miners in Chile to help keep his trap shut until Christmas. ®

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