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Adobe To Donate Flex SDK To Open Source Community

Posted by timothy on from the free-bunnies-and-kittens dept.

New submitter ProbablyJoe writes "InfoQ reports that Adobe is to donate its web application SDK, Flex, to an 'an established open source foundation' — suspected to either be the Open Spoon Foundation (who have been working on an open source fork of Flex), or the more established Apache Foundation. Adobe has stated on its blog that they consider HTML5 to be a better technology for the future than its own Flex platform, causing frustration among developers who have used the platform for enterprise applications. Is this a generous contribution to the open source community, or just Adobe offloading another failing technology?"

6 of 158 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Just another offload. by cjpa · · Score: 5, Insightful

    and why shouldn't they? If they already decided that they wouldn't support the product anymore, then it makes sense to donate it to the community. Maybe some enterprising people can make it work for them. Just look at what it did for web-browser technology when Netscape opensourced their - at that time 'almost end-of-line' - product to the opensource community...

  2. FOSS attitude fail. by Xest · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Right, so when a company end of lines a product they're criticised for not open sourcing it.

    Now when a company open sources an end of lined product, they're "offloading another failing technology".

    This is why companies don't give a fuck what the FOSS community thinks, because with the FOSS community you can never do anything right. See all the whinging about Android's open source initiatives for another fine example.

    1. Re:FOSS attitude fail. by bjourne · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Sorry, but that is not the attitude of the FOSS community - just some random commentator setting up a false dilemma. He does not represent the view of "the community". Neither does I ofcourse, but I think it is awesome that Adobe will finally open source Flex.

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    2. Re:FOSS attitude fail. by Tim+C · · Score: 1, Insightful

      When his comments are posted on the front page of arguably the single biggest, most-influential FOSS website, that's when.

      If you post something as-is, expect people to associate you with whatever it is that you posted.

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  3. Re:Did hell just freeze over or something? by DrXym · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Pretty icy. They also discontinued flash mobile, same week. I think we're going to see a new class of development tool from adobe here in the next few months. All of this is a leadup to that, I think.

    Not necessarily. I think it's quite feasible for them to repurpose their authoring tools so they crap out HTML 5 instead of flash content, at least in those cases where there is analogous functionality.

  4. Re:Just another offload. by larry+bagina · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Yes, let's look at that. AOL didn't just dump the netscape source code and walk away, they created the Mozilla Foundation and provided $2 million of initial financing. MF hit a jackpot with search bar royalties and while it's open source, virtually all development is from paid Mozilla employees.

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