I am a bit late to write about this, but Adobe has decided to open source Flex fully by the end of the year. It will be released under MPL. The Flex SDK, the compiler, debugger, flex components and AS3 libraries – all will be open sourced.
This is a major move! A very strategic one I must say. Adobe is certainly trying to kill competition – whether it is OpenLaszlo, or the upcoming Microsoft technologies including WPF/E & Silverlight. Making Flex open source will not only get a lot more visibility for Adobe & Flex, it will also mean a lot more developers who can contribute to Flex, while Adobe focuses on Apollo as a delivery platform for Flex and HTML. I am sensing that Adobe’s got plans to push Apollo real hard. They may even have a couple of very strong products using Flex coming out in the near future. I wouldn’t be surprised if one of them is related to entertainment!
But heck, whatever is the business agenda behind this, it’s a great news for developers! We will see more news from Adobe soon!
And for all those who did not notice it yet, the announcement comes right before Mix 07 – the Microsoft conference where they are going to do a lot of talk / demos on Silverlight. (it was also an eyebrow raiser to notice the similarity in name of this conference with Adobe’s MAX!)