In ironic twist, Adobe takes on Apple for not being open government friendly

Adobe Systems Inc., which was criticized last year for developing products that make it difficult to extract federal data, unleashed a salvo against Apple for blocking common programs used to share government information.

Apple recently barred developers of iPhone apps from using tools that support Adobe's Flash Player, a program that displays animation and video on Web pages. The company's newly released iPad does not support the player either. These restrictions, Adobe officials argue, run afoul of President Obama's open government goals initiative by stifling innovation -- specifically Adobe's innovations. The requirements prevent developers' from exchanging and repackaging government information so the public can see the effects of policies and the performance of federal programs.

On Monday, Rob Pinkerton, director of government solutions for Adobe, wrote a sharp blog post headlined, "Will you read the open government memo on an iPad?" In the entry, Pinkerton said he sees irony in using a gadget that shuts out widely used software to view a document Obama distributed his first day in office that espouses the principles of transparency, collaboration and participation.

"I still find it hard to believe that a company that founded one of the most generative platforms in the PC era (the Apple II -- which shaped an innovative spirit that enabled the Internet era to follow) could possibly work so hard to close down the openness of the Internet," he wrote. "Yet that is exactly what the iPad and iPhone strategy does -- a strategy that contradicts the president's open government goals and undermines Internet-era innovation."

Apple officials did not respond to requests for comment.

Adobe reportedly might be contemplating filing a law suit against Apple for blocking the use of Adobe Flash on the iPad and iPhone.

But Adobe has been attacked for engaging in the same business practices it is accusing Apple of applying: promoting what critics call proprietary and inflexible products that make it difficult to analyze federal data to gain new insights into government policies, opponents say.

The Sunlight Foundation, a government transparency group with a division that builds applications, considered picketing an open government conference that Adobe hosted last year. Sunlight has said government data in PDF files is hard to analyze because it cannot be easily extracted for mash-ups, online charts created by pulling data from documents and combining it with statistics from other sources. The purpose of repackaging the data is to uncover meaningful relationships such as correlations between campaign donations and federal spending.

Adobe officials defended themselves by arguing there was a distinction between open government for people and open government for machines. PDFs are replicas of printed documents, making it easier for the human eye to read, while Web formats such as XML enable computers to break up data for automated analysis. "The fact that we're presenting data in PDF is not a bad thing," Pinkerton said in 2009. "It's that we're not presenting it in formats [conducive to parsing by computers] as well."

Pinkerton admitted in his post that Adobe "had been lauded and criticized for our role in enabling open government. When we have been criticized we listen and learn so we can improve our business strategy to support the goals of open government." As an example of how the company is supporting the initiative, he noted Adobe is co-sponsoring a contest with Sunlight that challenges the public to design graphics summarizing government data.

On March 23, Sen. Thomas Carper, D-Del., chairman of the Subcommittee on Federal Financial Management, Government Information, Federal Services and International Security, invited officials from Adobe and Sunlight to testify side-by-side on the issue of access to government information, including the role of file formats in advancing open government. But the hearing, along with others that afternoon, was canceled because of an unrelated procedural move in the Senate. Carper's office on Monday had no comment on this latest debate about technological impediments to open government.

The Sunlight Foundation is a victim of Apple's license terms, Clay Johnson, director of the group's Sunlight Labs developer community, said. The organization's Real Time Congress application, which displays live updates about action on the House and Senate floors, violates the new agreement with iPhone app developers.

"Apple's move is bad for open government, because they've made it so that our app, Real Time Congress, which is good for open government, could be removed from the platform under the new rules," he said. "That gives the data we produce less visibility and people less access to what their lawmakers are doing."

The organization plans to abandon Apple's App Store, a one-stop shop for downloading applications. "In a move to ensure quality apps in the App Store, and to keep Adobe locked out of the platform, the big casualties are small groups like us trying to make an impact on a shoestring," Johnson said. "If there's one thing this latest move has taught us it's to stick to open standards like HTML and JavaScript. No matter what platform you're on, those standards will always run."

Johnson said it was unfair to apply the standards of Obama's transparency agenda to a company: "Adobe's got some excellent points about Apple not being open, participatory or collaborative, but we don't elect Apple to govern us either."