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Adobe has announced that they will be making Flex, the development environment for Flash, Open Source under the Mozilla Public License.
Adobe Flex was initially released in 2004 by Macromedia, and is available since 2006 as a free SDK from Adobe. Flex is a set of tools to support the development of RIA, and web applications similar to .Net or J2EE. Although the tools will be open sourced the runtime will remain closed and proprietary. The source code for the Action script was already opened, but with this announcement the entire environment including the debugger, compiler etc will be opened up by the end of 2007.
This is a strategic move to build momentum for the Adobe Apollo ecosystem, which is primarily criticized for being a closed and proprietary framework. The company is facing growing competition from startups like Dekoh, Joyent and Open Source community in the RIA space. Not to mention Microsoft is also targeting this area now with the recent release of Silverlight, which is a competitor to Adobe Flash.
Ryan Stewart has an excellent run down of the announcement also see the video announcement below, via ScobleShow.
Hey, that’s pretty cool!
I’m not a big fan of Adobe, on the whole, but… hey, it’s a step in the right direction.
Big companies moving products to open source seems to be a growing trend these days. Good to see