Dr. Fielding Talks Open Source and Innovation with 18F and Presidential Innovation Fellows

By Brian Paget

Last week, Roy T. Fielding, Senior Principal Scientist at Adobe and co-founder of the Apache HTTP Server Project, came to Washington, DC to meet with 18F, a digital consultancy for the U.S. Government inside the General Services Administration. 18F is also the programmatic home of Presidential Innovation Fellowship. Dr. Fielding and I spoke with the 18F team about innovation, policy and a wide-range of technology issues.

Dr. Fielding discussed his experience developing the modern World Wide Web infrastructure and his work as the former chairman of the Apache Software Foundation, as well as his involvement in the Do Not Track standards and Representational State Transfer (REST). Dr. Fielding and I were able to share how his work on open development, based on the trifecta of open source, open standards, and open architecture, have been instrumental in the design and development of Adobe’s Marketing Cloud and Experience Manager products. Without Dr. Fielding’s extensive work, many of today’s most popular web-based products and services wouldn’t exist. While there are many ongoing debates about free/open-source software (FOSS), open development is recognized to both increase innovation and drive adoption.

At Adobe, we are active and ambitious in our release and support of open source technologies, and believe that open source, open standards, and open architecture are key components for building modular and extensible software systems. We have long strived to create products and solutions that are open and standards compliant. We are proud to have Dr. Fielding as part of our team and were honored to join him and the 18F team to discuss how open development is driving innovation and can ultimately help in building the best possible digital government architecture.

To learn more about Adobe’s open source efforts, visit: http://www.adobe.com/open.html