Flex Going Open Source

Posted in Flex | Posted on 04-26-2007 | 2,532 views

Last night while the world slept (ok, most American timezones), Adobe announced that they were open sourcing Flex. Once again the Labs site is being used to host information:

http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/Flex:Open_Source

There you will find a a pretty lengthy faq about their move to open source as well. Hopefully we will see this up on RIAForge!

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Ryan Guill said on 04-26-2007 at 7:00 AM #
	I am still trying to process this, and what it really means. Is this really a good thing?

Joe Mastroianni said on 04-26-2007 at 9:13 AM #
	Exactly. What does this mean for deployment costs?

Raymond Camden said on 04-26-2007 at 10:45 AM #

Let me start off by saying that I am not an Open Source Zealot. I think OS is "nice" (shoot, I share all of my work), but I don't get political about it. To me - it is one more attribute like cost, platform support, etc. So to me it is good in that it opens up the code base to support from the world. How much contributions come in is totally up in the air. Maybe none. But it can't hurt.

Joe - not quite sure what you mean. It certainly won't increase the cost to deploy.

Joe Mastroianni said on 04-26-2007 at 11:01 AM #
	I guess I meant development and deployment costs. FlexBuilder is 500.00. Other components from Adobe also cost money. I take those will most likely not be open sourced?

Nat Papovich said on 04-26-2007 at 11:25 AM #

You can check out the FAQ Ray points to, but it appears that Adobe will continue to charge for Flex Builder ($500+) along with Flex Data Services ($$$). They're basically open-sourcing everything they currently give away for free. They'll also continue to offer everything under a commercial (supported) license, similar to, say MySQL.

Ray, they've mentioned that it'll be under the Mozilla umbrella so chances are slim for a home at RIAForge.

TJ Downes said on 04-26-2007 at 1:00 PM #
	Nat, they actually are using the Mozilla license, that's it. The project will not be under the umbrella of Mozilla and will stay under Adobe's wing. So it could end up on RIAForge, but I suspect Adobe will host the project themselves.

Raymond Camden said on 04-26-2007 at 1:02 PM #
	Don't forget though that there is a free, limit throughput, version of FDS, and you don't _need_ FlexBuilder to write Flex apps.

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