Open sourcing Flex.
Today, Adobe unveiled a major open source initiative.
In short, Adobe announced it will release Flex under the Mozilla Public License (MPL). So, in conjunction with Tamarin, Adobe has just made the next generation of web experiences an open experience.
Basically, Adobe has just changed the nature of the game for developing RIAs (Rich Internet Applications).
Here, go read the official stuff.
Now, to some, this might not be a big deal, but what you can do with Flex is nothing short of amazing. As a start, I’d suggest hopping over to Podtech and see what the excitement is about from the guys who know.
What I want to spend some time discussion is what this means from an open source perspective.
First, the choice of MPL. This choice was the best one to help remove the concerns of of our customers and other commercial vendors, while retaining the drive to release code changes as the modifications are distributed. It also pairs well into the Tamarin project, which was also released under an MPL license.
MPL allows the community to innovate freely, and that innovation will help bring Flex freely into new opportunities and new features.
Second, open source is only as good as who gets involved.
So how do you get involved? Well, there are a couple of ways to immediately start.
First, hop over to http://www.flex.org and make sure we know that you’re interested.
Second, sign up on the Google group http://groups.google.com/group/flex-open-source
to take part in the Flex discussion. We want to hear from you.
Third, go download the current Flex SDK from Adobe.
And Finally.
Let us hear from you. Open source is all about interactions and communications, so join in and speak up.
Comments
is flex of any use when there is no native flash player for your OS ?
I run freebsd for all dev
work, it's an outstanding
platform but this lack of native flash player is quite
frustrating to say the least.
(and no, it doesn't play nice under linux compat. try it before you comment)
at least stop pretending eh ?
OSS != linux.
Posted by: paul | June 24, 2007 09:41 AM
Will we ever see other Adobe products that are used widely available on the Linux platform? So we have the Flash Player and an old version of Adobe Reader for Linux. I want to see Adobe supporting the Windows and Linux base equally and diligently. I suppose with the (hopefully in progress) conversion of Adobe software to Universal Binary form for Macs, it should make it relatively easy to port the application to Linux, since you pretty much are halfway there.... Granted, Mac OS X uses a very different UI system backend, Aqua with Cocoa/Carbon. Of course those Mac OS X devs might be able to help with porting to GTK+ or QT and using X11 calls. Or heck, using wxWidgets might be easier, though it would require a more radical codebase change. What I would like to see is a uniform package for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. And don't make the same mistake about audio in Linux with Flash Player 9 with the Adobe software. Use GStreamer, it makes Linux audio and video work much simpler because it supports ALSA, DSound, and OSS.
Posted by: King InuYasha | July 16, 2007 07:21 AM