Adobe Announces Flex SDK to be open sourced

By scott

Adobe has announced that they are planning, over the next year, to open source the Flex SDK. Using the Mozilla Public License developers will now be able to contribute and enhance the Flex SDK including the Flex framework classes, the Flex components, the Actionscript debugger, the Actionscript 3 compilers (including the mxmls and compc compilers).

Starting in June 2007 Adobe will be posting daily builds of the Flex SDK and providing open access to a bug database online. In December of 2007 after the release of “Moxie” (Flex 3) Adobe will be posting all software assets into a public Subversion repository for public access.

What this means is development models and methods can now be drastically improved or invented. If you want to develop a Flex app using Rails, go for it. If you want to use .NET to build your Flex app, be Adobe’s guest. What this doesn’t mean is open source of the Flash Player, nor should it be (IMO) open sourced. While you are still limited to the capabilities of the Flash Player, your development process is now not limited to the existing SDK. In fact, any software developer can now make their own IDE, Flex Builder and Flash CS3 need not apply.

Flex has seen extraordinary growth in the past 6 months. Enterprise applications are popping up all the time. And with the launch of Silverlight (worst name ever by the way) the RIA arena just got a little more crowded. Personally, I feel that opening up the SDK will help attract a whole other breed of developers, ones that feel tied down to a corporate development environment. For the same reasons developers were staying away from .Net in its early day, they are staying away from Flex. Corporate controlled development environments and languages are always limited to the limits of the compiler, languages, and/or authoring environments. Back in the day, the open source arena exploded with the likes of PHP, Apache, Tomcat, etc. all open sourced and equally as powerful (or more so in my eyes). Suddenly .Net or Java was limited to developers or companies with very deep pockets. Open sourcing has worked for PHP and it is the reason it wasn’t gobbled up by corporate backed languages such as .Net or Java, <sarcascm>take a look around, you may notice a few PHP sites on the good old interweb.</sarcascm>.

Will Flex be the next PHP? Will the community take Flex development to the next level? Will Flex development now be the defacto when it comes to RIA, is it already? No one knows, only time will tell. A colleague of mine just had an interesting quote. “There are no open source millionaires.” I don’t think Adobe cares about that, that’s Microsofts attitude. Adobe just wants to provide the best possible solutions for their customers. They’ll keep making money from products like Photoshop