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

Thanks?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is the technological equivalent of donating AIDS infected blood.

Did hell just freeze over or something?

[Robert Zenz]

Microsoft dumps stuff in favor of HTML5.

Adobe dumps stuff in favor of HTML5.

Can somebody check the temperature in hell, please?

Re:Did hell just freeze over or something?

[DrXym]

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.

Re:Did hell just freeze over or something?

[cshark]

I think it would be awesome to see an html 5/canvas/css3 animation program. Crappy as it might be. I for one welcome our new ridiculous animated logo overlords.

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.

Re:Just another offload.

[cjpa]

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...

FOSS attitude fail.

[Xest]

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.

Re:FOSS attitude fail.

[bjourne]

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.

Re:FOSS attitude fail.

[pebs]

Flex was already open source.. They are just pushing the responsibility of maintaining it to the community. Now if they were open sourcing the Flash Player, I would commend them for that as it could ease the pain a little of those stuck relying on this legacy technology.

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.

Adobe Edge

[tepples]

Based on what I've read elsewhere, it's called Adobe Edge, and it's supposed to be an authoring tool for animations to be played back using JavaScript and HTML5's 2D canvas. Tim Langdell will be pissed.

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:Trash The Flash, Keep The Flex

[wonkavader]

Agreed. Flex really isn't bad.

I did a real business app in it. It was not my choice, but once the choice was made, Flex turned out to be not terrible.

Not a bad language. Not too bad a development environment. But it needed some growing up, needed some changes to the event model, needed a little more coherency. But it worked, and it was pleasant to write in.

Re:NO NO NO

[Merk42]

You do realize HTML5 is far far more than just a video player right? Even so "HTML5 Video" doesn't inherently mean WebM nor H.264 as the format isn't part of the standard.

Need FlashBlock for HTML5

[denis-The-menace]

Now with HTML5 becoming the the preferred nuisance apparatus, can we create something to block them browser side?

Re:Need FlashBlock for HTML5

[Yvan256]

Sure. It's called "disable javascript" and it's already built-in all browsers worth using.

Re:Just another offload.

[larry bagina]

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.