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Adobe Flex goes open source

I have a release to get out the door this week, it’s almost time to go to the office, and I haven’t had breakfast yet. What am I doing writing a post right now?

It must be because Adobe has announced they’re open sourcing Flex. I have to hand it to Adobe: this is a great move on their part, for a bunch of different reasons:

• There’s a large, able body of developers who are ready to put their energy behind making Flex a standout platform. The quality and the feature completeness can improve greatly if the project is managed well.
• These days, information about a platform that remains proprietary and under wraps is an adoption barrier, not a competitive advantage. Although the framework code was already available, we didn’t have public access to the dev tool sources, the bug database, the development roadmap, and many other staples of OS projects.
• Flex vs. the competing MS Silverlight/WPF is no longer a mere feature comparison game, it’s a philosophy comparison.
• In contrast to the more balkanized AJAX platform world, this creates a clearly dominant open-source platform in the rich-internet-client space.

Now the big questions are going to be the little questions. For instance, from the Flex Open Source FAQ:

Our goal is to make the initial open source distribution as close to the commercial distributions of the Flex SDK as possible. Due to restrictions on some components that have been licensed from third parties or come from other Adobe products, some portions of the current free Flex 2 SDK may be made available in binary form only.

Hmmm…. what will those pieces be?

Anyway, I’m pleased and pumped that my favorite client platform of the present day is heading in a really constructive direction.