In a recent press release Adobe announced its plan to open source Flex under the Mozilla Public License (MPL). With this new decision, developers from all over the world will be able to contribute in the development of Flex, the industry’s most advanced framework for building cross-operating system rich Internet applications (RIAs) for the Web and enabling new Apollo applications for the desktop.
“Open source has been pivotal to the rapid growth of Alfresco, and it’s great to see Adobe take a similar approach to Flex technology,” said John Newton, CTO of Alfresco. “We’ve been very interested in using the Flex SDK to put a more usable and engaging face on enterprise content management, and this move by Adobe makes that all the more attractive.”
This release confirms Adobe’s commitment to the open source community which released earlier ActionScript Virtual Machine to the Mozilla Foundation under the Tamarin project, full PDF 1.7 specification for ISO standardization, and used the open source WebKit engine in the “Apollo” project.
“The definition and evolution of Flex has been influenced by our incredibly talented developer community from day one,” said David Mendels, senior vice president, Enterprise and Developer Business Unit at Adobe. “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.”
Open Source Flex is scheduled to be available by end 2007, more information on Adobe’s Labs.
