Neutral to slightly negative. Because of GPL terms, having it be open- 
source didn't help their engineers evaluate it early, as they weren't  
allowed to look at the code. Because it was published, valuation of  
patentable technology was lower. IF by being open-source more people  
had used it, that would have helped, but that wasn't the case.

Mostly Adobe was buying people and ideas, not existing code, so mostly  
it didn't matter.

The one really good thing about open-sourcing it is that it forced us  
to write code that we wouldn't be embarassed by having other people  
read, and that helped code quality and permanently improved some of  
our coding practices.

Matthew Kaufman

(Sent from my iPhone)

On Dec 12, 2008, at 8:49 AM, zooko <[email protected]> wrote:

> Thanks for the notes on your experience getting your ideas deployed.
>
> Would you say that having published the GPL'ed version of MFP helped
> you get the deal with Adobe?  Or would you have been just as
> successful with Adobe if MFP had been closed-source?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Zooko
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