Adobe Flex heading for open source

Stephen Withers
Friday, 27 April 2007 04:11

Business IT - Technology

Adobe has announced plans to move Flex into the open source world by the end of 2007.

Flex is Adobe's framework for creating rich Internet applications (RIAs). The source code for the Flex SDK has been provided for some time, so what Adobe is adding is the infrastructure for interested developers to feed back any bug fixes or improvements they make, the opportunity to test builds between official releases, and the right to create 'larger works' based on the code.

The Flex Builder integrated development environment (IDE) will remain a commercial product, and users will still have the option of buying the commercial, Adobe-supported version of the Flex SDK.

Flex can be used on Windows (XP, Server 2003 or Vista Professional or Ultimate), Mac OS X 10.4, Linux (Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 or 4, or Suse 10), or Solaris (9 or 10). Completed applications can run on any system that supports Flash.

"The definition and evolution of Flex has been influenced by our incredibly talented developer community from day one," said David Mendels, senior vice president of Adobe's enterprise and developer business unit. "The decision to open source Flex was a completely natural next step. I am incredibly excited to deeply collaborate with the developer community on Flex, and further fuel its momentum and innovation."

Some observers suggest that part of Adobe's motivation for the change is Microsoft's forthcoming Silverlight (formerly Windows Presentation Foundation/Everywhere), but Adobe does have a track record in open source, including its contribution of the ActionScript virtual machine to the Mozilla Foundation.

Adobe has chosen to use the Mozilla Public Licence (MPL) for Flex.

The process of open sourcing will begin this northern summer with daily pre-release builds of "Moxie," the code-name of the next version, but it won't be until the Moxie's final release ("currently scheduled for the second half of 2007") that the MPL terms will kick in, allowing outside programmers to contribute to the project.