Adobe To Donate Flex SDK To Open Source Community

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?"

Comments

Player?

[lavaforge]

Will this include player components? As it stands, the span of usefulness for the SDK is going to be limited if there isn't a player to run the output.

Re:NO NO NO

[hedwards]

WebM is free, H.264 costs money on both the encoding and decoding end. Standards should never require payment to use.

Trash The Flash, Keep The Flex

[Anonymous Coward]

I've used the Flex SDK and FlexBuilder IDE. While the underlying Flash runtime is notoriously bad, the declarative XML structure, ActionScript language and matching IDE are actually quite pleasant to work with. I'd love to see someone replace the dreadful Flash runtime with a native HTML5 runtime but keep the decent bits.

Anybody know what this means for Adobe's AIR platform?

Re:Did hell just freeze over or something?

[datavirtue]

As a developer I don't like the thought of developing for any specific mobile platform. When I think mobile, I think web-based; as-in accessible from any device. Still though, apps will be built because of device specific functionality like sensors and cameras. Hopefully this stuff can be addressed from a web app in the future. Java Applets anyone? I guess Java was to far ahead of its time, and no one wants to play well with it (Apple) because they lose control over the user that way.