Adobe just announced that we will be open sourcing the Flex 3 SDK under an open source Mozilla Public License (MPL). This will be a dual license model that will allow both open source and commercial developers to extend and enhance the Flex framework to suit their own needs and to contribute to the evolution of Flex. We will be releasing all of the components of the Flex SDK that developers need to create Flex applications, including the Java source code for the ActionScript and MXML compilers, the ActionScript debugger, and the ActionScript libraries that make up the core Flex framework. Flex Builder, which is the Eclipse-based IDE, is not part of the open source announcement. More information about the announcement can be found on the FAQ.

I’m very excited about this because I really believe it will help the adoption of the Adobe platform. Flex is a great software development framework – it really makes it significantly easier to develop rich internet apps. Prior to coming to Adobe I really wasn’t aware of Flex, and didn’t know too much about ActionScript. I had Mark Anders take me through a comparison of coding in ActionScript vs. FlexBuilder, and it was a huge eye opener. I don’t code, but I’ve spent many, many years doing product management for IDE’s, and I’ve seen my share of Ajax development so I have some perspective on this. Flex Builder is awesome. And the core Flex SDK is extremely powerful. It also makes it very easy to build Apollo apps – as we saw with Scrapblog, apps built in Flex move over to Apollo with incredible ease. We’re seeing some really interesting innovation with Apollo already, and with Flex moving to the open source community I think we’ll just see that innovation grow exponentially.