Flex3, Air 1 launch!
A big day for Adobe. Flex 3 SDK goes live. This is a big deal for us, since it fulfills the first part of our open source efforts, and completes the commitment from last year. Also ready for real world is BlazeDS. Oh yeah, a little free product called AIR went version 1 today. (Now AIR isn't open source, but it is free.) And we're still looking for Linux alpha users; see Even Penguins can get a breath of fresh AIR.
(actually, there are a lot of our projects out there on the newly launched Adobe Open Source site.)
In short, open source is important to Adobe.
A year ago (a bit more), when I joined Adobe for open source, I was personally frustrated in trying to find all the places we have open source activities. And yes, it's not perfect yet. But one of O'Reilly's thoughts on development patterns in open source is the perpetual beta. Consider our open source work a perpetual beta; it's change, evolve, grow.
There was some interesting blogs on how little, how slow.
Well, let's look at it this way. A research paper pointed out the change in communication models over the years, from phone calls, to emails, to IM and Tweets. The interesting things was in the age dynamic. Kids tend to favor the 140 character message, adults favor the phone call.
Well, many of you probably are in the mix of email, IM, tweet, etc, You've learned the power of new behavior. Companies also need to learn new behavior.And we're trying to move a company by the easy way, explanation, rather than the hard way, explosion.
Anyway, I'm sitting here at the Adobe Engage event, and we demonstrated the AIR alpha on Linux (Ubuntu), with the same app directly across from Mac. Small steps, but the fact that they are occurring are important.
So it's a journey. Please join in with us. We're recreating the experience and making it possible to show Adobe the interest and power of the open source world. But that depends on you as much as it does us.