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

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: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.

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: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?