That’s right, the Flex SDK is going to be licensed under the Mozilla Public
License – this means the compiler, debugger, the huge libraries – it’s all going
to be open source when Flex 3 “Moxie” is going to be released.
This news was not so surprising to me because I’ve heard there have been lots
and lots of discussions before on how to make Flex “open”. You have to keep in
mind that a big company like Adobe is making transition from being a fully
closed company to being more open – from the introduction of Adobe
Labs to getting more open culture infused from
Macromedia, to donating the ActionScript3 VM as open source to Mozilla, and now
Flex. You can clearly see how this evolution is happening. Even the PDF format
is going from a de-facto standard to a de-jure standard by the ISO organization.
Coming back to Flex, just some time ago I had noted how open Flex is, even
we’re now taking the next big step and making even the code free. Awesome stuff.
I personally still think there’s one issue that needs to be addressed. There
are two parts to the story – the production and consumption, which is, the
creation and the playback. The creation part is now not just open but open
source! Why not make the playback part open? If we can allow anyone to create a
player that plays SWF formats, that would be great. Of course, if we make the
Flash Player itself open source, that would be mind-blowing, but I think the
minimum that should be done is to allow other SWF players in the market. Not
that anybody can beat Flash Player (it’s very very hard)…
The news is still sinking in (it was announced just an hour ago, as of this
writing). So, more coverage here: