Adobe learns lessons of open-source Flex Adobe Systems is learning the challenges and complexities of taking its software open source. Just a year and a half after Adobe released its Flex Software Development Kit (SDK) under the Mozilla Public License (MPL) to encourage developer buy in, it's the company - not the community - that continues to shoulder the burden of …
The cynic in me believes Adobe only open sourced AVM2 was because it was an ECMA/Javascript engine that by sharing it with the Mozilla codebase could drive adoption of the Flash player and thus ActionScript, Flex is the necessary library platform to support that.
I don't know if the AVM2 code folded into Tamarin will still execute Adobe's ActionScript in Firefox et al, but you can certainly see why they'd want it to.
The crown jewels I suspect will remain closed, and since they bought Macromedia, SVG has long since dropped off Adobe's priority list, which is a great shame as Flash had been seen as their big threat.
...is the Adobe store, and that kind of confused, frankenstein mishmash of web technologies is what we have to look forward to, then I for one hope it dies a real quick death.
Ever tried bookmarking something on the Adobe store? Tough.
Any web page that needs a progress bar while it's loading is a FAIL.
What's new? Corporation wants community to work for them, then says "open source" doesn't solve all their problems. As long as Adobe's Flash-related stuff is centred on Adobe's proprietary interests, why should anyone with an interest in open source and open standards bother to show up for this kind of thing? Choosing the MPL was a mistake, too - even Mozilla (the M in MPL) can be licensed under the GPL.
The problem for Adobe is that they don't really grok FOSS in any meaningful way. From what I've seen of flex, it uses hardly any other FOSS tech, it's completely stand alone and is a total buy in which requires massive amounts of amnesia about your previous work on w3c standard websites.
Isn't FOSS supposed to be about scientific method? build upon each others ideas. Not invent some unwholely new stack. FAIL
Adobe, like IBM want a free lunch from the Open Source Community.
If we look at IBM's licensing for Eclipse, they are free to use whatever is created as part of their commercial products based on Eclipse code. (Rational Application Developer).
If we look at IBM's other open source initiative Cloudscape now released as Derby or Sun's JavaDB, the main supporters of the open source work are contributors of Sun and IBM. (I think those from IBM have since moved on and most of the support for Derby is coming from Sun developers.)
The article is spot on and it goes to show the issues with adopting certain open source projects or tools. Sorry while I am a big fan of Open Source, I realize that certain applications that are in the Open Source world do not match their commercial counterparts.
buzzword alert!!! buzzword alert!!! Open Source is the new web 2.0 .
How much do you think they will sell Linux flex builder for? Well after the Linux community fixes it and hands it to them with a nice red bow on it. I hate it when these corporations use the words open source in any of their propaganda. The bottom line is that they basically expect these two words to cut production costs. If you looked at the trunk of gumbo you would see that they can't even get their paths right in a setup.sh file. Or do they even try? It seams to me they just spew code with copy paste and expect a free fix. Adobe "thanks for the fix you are super swell. Would you like to buy the new flex builder Linux license for 500 dollars?"
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