After months of threatening to do so, Adobe has finally open sources Flex. (Press Release, Scoble Vids)
Under a business-friendly Mozilla Public License, Flex is now open source. The Flex Press Release says:
“Open source co-creation is a powerful way to build a strong development community,” said James Governor, Founder of RedMonk. “Adobe's decision to open source the Flex SDK is a radical move which should attract a new class of developer to the platform.”
What we're seeing is a shift of differentiating between a platform and an application. If you create a platform and want it to be successful, there is a need for a large developer community. That community needs to experiment. Experiments are best done on the cheap.
One of the major issues one has with closed source environments is that bug fixes come slowly. Flex, as the Scoble video points out, will have daily builds of the new open source Flex SDK. Try to get that out of Microsoft.
It seems likely that we'll be developing both Silverlight and Flex / Apollo applications simultaneously at Gray Hill. I hope to have some of our developers guest post here to say how they are going.
Hedge yer bets!
Blogged at Gray Hill Harbor Offices in Seattle using Windows Live Writer
Interesting news.
Will Adobe monetize this as well as Sun has Java?
Posted by: Robert W. Anderson | 30 April 2007 at 12:24