Marred with the new open-source movement in the software industry, software giants like Adobe, Sun and Microsoft are all planning to develop open-source software applications to rule the new age Internet.

The reason behind this is that developers are more comfortable when they know that they are developing applications for a company and still not come under the rules and regulations of the company.

This has made several industry leaders sing a new song: ‘Free your software and developers will follow’. The open-source software has given great competition to companies like Microsoft who earlier believed that ‘they rule by killing others’. Now the company has to take some strict actions if they want to keep up their supremacy in the world of rich internet applications (RIAs).

Taking a bold decision at this week’s JavaOne Conference in San Francisco, Sun stated that it will open-source its JavaFX Script programming language later this year. In a similar decision Adobe also released open-source programming tools for its competing Flash technology.

The Redmond giant also did not want to stay back at this and has released code for Silverlight under its own liberal license. Microsoft rules by making users happy and if it wants to continue this lead then it would have to deliver software that makes users feel that the application has not been made at Microsoft but is open-source.

Moreover, open-source software also have its own benefits like they are mostly custom made and users feel that their individual preferences have been taken care of in this software.

Meanwhile all these three giants of the software industry are in a battle to develop the best rich internet applications that will be platform independent. This means that the application will run on anything from a PC to a cell phone. Such applications are the need of today and the company who will be able to deliver the best products will surely rule the market. To achieve this lead all companies will not even leave a single stone unturned and will do anything that is needed to attract the most developers to write cool applications for its platform.

Microsoft, Adobe and Sun all are aware of the fact that developers feel more comfortable working in open-source environment.

All three giants of the industry have shown strong resistance to open-source software in the past, but now times have changed and open-source is the new era. This change has also changed the approach of software companies like Microsoft who are now starting to adopt a hybrid solution to software development that unites their tradition with the need of the day.

We can also say that all three giants are taking a clue from Ajax, the nonproprietary scripting technique that’s currently the hottest thing in web applications. Ajax is an open-source language and most important is the fact that the language is standards based, which is the reason why developers love to write applications for it.

Till now Sun has been the only company that has come up with the rendering engine of its software. They have agreed to release the core technology behind Java under open-source license.

Adobe and Microsoft have also followed Sun though not completely. Adobe has released its Flex software-development kit for Flash and Apollo was released under the Mozilla Public License and the code for its Tamarin script-rendering engine was donated to the Mozilla Foundation for inclusion in the Firefox browser. However, the company has still kept the Flash rendering engine under wraps.

Microsoft has also done the same by releasing the Dynamic Language Runtime component of its .Net platform, upon which Silverlight runs, under its own Microsoft Permissive License. This component lets coders write programs in open-source languages and then compile and run them as Silverlight applications.

This certainly is a better move than that of Adobe because it will allow programmers to develop code in their favorite languages and then run them in Microsoft platform. However, while comparing the move with Adobe we also find that Microsoft has also not released the rendering engine which can make it a truly open-source product.

Open-source software is good if these giants want that their applications should be able to run on all platforms but if these companies really want to make that happen then they will have to be more lenient and release products that are 100% open-source.

Image Credit: Typepad