Flex is now Open source

The news is available on labs. The official Press release can be found here. Adobe has recently made a great announcement of open sourcing the Flex under the MPL license (the same license under which Action Script VM was open sourced). Along with Flex SDK (whose source is available already), this also includes the source code of ActionScript and MXML compiler, ActionScript debugger and core ActionScript libraries of SDK.

The immediate plans (summers 2007) are to post daily builds of Flex SDK and to have a public bugbase. After the Moxie release, there will be publicly accessible Subversion repository which can be accessed/used/modified by “trusted” developers. To start with, these “trusted” developers will include the internal teams. As the process gains momentum, external contributors may be granted commit privileges to the core SDK. External contributors may also be granted access to manage “sub projects” of the SDK.

In words of David Wadhwani, the vice president of product development for Flex

“Initially people will be able to contribute code by attaching it to a bug or enhancement request in the public bug database and we’ll clearly state our development philosophies at this time. After a few months we’ll start looking for external committers. We’ll look for individuals who have been active contributors of high quality code that most closely maps to our development philosophies.”

Flex has already got a great adoption in the RIA community and now with the strength of open source community Flex surely has a great future ahead. Developers will be able to access, modify and contribute to the source code for the Flex compiler, components and application framework. This will also allow other open-source projects to leverage full capabilities of the Flex Framework.

Just after the Microsoft’s announcement for SilverLight (which created a lot of chaos in the RIA community), this news is giving an indication that the war has begun. As an answer to Microsoft’s “we’re doing that too, but better!”, Adobe has seemingly tightened their belts sayin “Let’s see!!!”.

In context of Microsoft I found a nice discussion here which says:

Jeffrey Hammond, an analyst with Forrester, said he sees the battle unfolding between Adobe with Apollo and Flex versus Microsoft with its Silverlight and XAML (Extensible Application markup Language). Additionally, Hammond said he believes the platform ubiquity of Microsoft’s WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) versus the potential ubiquity of open source should be a real test of classic models versus new business models in software.

Hammond also said that until Adobe announced its open-source plans for Flex, “it was one proprietary technology against another, so there was no reason for the standards-based crowd to join either side. Now, the standards crowd has some interesting reasons to join the Adobe camp.”

Flex SDK and other Flex products will also be available under the existing commercial licenses thus allowing both new and existing partners and customers to choose the license terms that best suit their requirements.

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