JD on EP

Top of Techmeme.

Ed Burnette sees it as "Adobe keeps Flash, Flex close to the vest". I could snark on that headline all day. ;-)

Aral Balkan was a key initiator of OSFlash, is pleasantly surprised by the news, and links to particular postings on Flexcoders with implementation and schedule info.

Nik Cubrilovic at TechCrunch leads with "Adobe have announced tonight, via Robert Scoble and the ScobleShow that they are opening up the Flex platform under a Mozilla Public License" and closes "Adobe are opening up part of their ecosystem, which is great, but don't hold your breath for an open source Flash runtime anytime soon (unlike Java)... this announcement will definitely be met with calls of 'not enough' from the open source community and those waiting for a fully open and cross platform rich application platform from Adobe." (NB: TechCrunch does not disclose its financial results, and the page is heavy with ads for proprietary software and services. If articles have bugs, you and I cannot get into the sourcecode and fix it. First run of comments are "I'm first" and "I'm second", but later gets into discussion about the value of predictable clientside capability. I still find TechCrunch useful, though.) Mark Blair already goes "huh? wuzzit?" on this emphasis.

Rexduffdixon is optimistic, and says "Now there will be capability to possibly have 50,000 developers working on something. This is better of course versus a jaded team of overpaid technologists debating issues such as 'does that 4 tone song sound right for our opening?'." (Guess I missed that meeting... did they serve jumbo shrimp for lunch? Maybe I was out golfing that day.... ;-)

Raven Zachary has a line which puzzles me: "It's hard not the see this move as reactive. We've had a string of open source rich Internet application (RIA) announcements over the past few years from Laszlo Systems to the Dojo Toolkit to Helmi Technologies to ICEsoft to Exadel to Nexaweb. The list goes on. Adobe is a late entrant. At this stage, RIA is synonymous with open source and the opportunities for proprietary RIA vendors seem fairly constrained." I've heard of Laszlo and Dojo, and know that Nexaweb hits the conference circuit, but in covering the field since the very first day's mention of "Rich Internet Applications" I haven't heard of those others, much less remembered their announcements, or what we're supposed to be catching up to. ;-)

Elizabeth Montalbano of IDG has a straight-up overview, but with a few lines which puzzle me: "Traditionally, Adobe has been seen as a more proprietary niche player in the digital document-creation and Web development tools space." (Let me refill the coffee cup, read that again.) "Adobe's ubiquitous portable document format (PDF), while available for free, has never been available to the community as a standard." (Sounds like she's relying on overall branding-type labels of opensource/proprietary, and is not distinguishing between developing free standard capability, or anyone being able to write free standard formats, or having governance over a file format's future, or maybe getting into the runtime aspects of getting a standard implementation on Other Peoples Machines... "available to the community as a standard" might benefit from a tighter definition there.)

Stacy Young sees a possibility for reducing the diversity in components.

Joe Berkovitz feels an odd compulsion: "I have a release to get out the door this week, it's almost time to go to the office, and I haven't had breakfast yet. What am I doing writing a post right now?" (He then goes on to tell us why.)

Joseph LaBrecque says "Open source zealots may stop trashing Flex for being closed source. This will effectively neuter that argument." I'm not so sure... for some people this will make the technology more palatable, but sometimes it has been difficult to dig down and discover the real basis for an objection.

Yakov Fain wonders how this will affect the market for components, and poses a number of other questions I'm not qualified to answer. "The FAQ on open source Flex, is written in Legal language, it would be nice to have an explanation in English with some use cases I've mentioned above."

Eric Dolecki wins this shift's Weird Title prize: "Flex with its pants off". (Let me refill that coffeecup again, shake the cobwebs out of my brain.... ;-)

David Coletta: "The reason I'm excited about today's announcement is that at Virtual Ubiquity we spend a lot of time and energy figuring out how to make components in the Flex Framework do exactly what we want them to do. I see the potential to accelerate that process, to give us more choices about how to build what we want to build, and to give us more choices among off-the-shelf components that we could use." Examples follow.

Rich Tretola has a handy list of which Flex technologies include source code and are in line for the contribution process... the Saffron type-rendering library is licensed through Mitsubishi, for instance, and its source is not published and editable... Flex Charting Components are one of the ways Adobe attempts to recoup its investment in the platform... handy chart.

Note to Stefan Richter, it's okay, calm down, calendar hasn't switched to April 1, we'll muddle through this okay, no worries.... ;-)

---

Brendan Eich, CTO of Mozilla, discusses a range of process issues, provides perspectives, mentions the possibility of translating XUL and MXML, and closes "Adobe is moving in the right direction. That's good enough for me today."

Adnan Wasim sees hope for interoperability, beyond the level of the slowly-converging HTML/JS/CSS implementations: "This is amazing news. I was concerned that we would lose the ability to move easily between Windows/ OS X / Linux on the web. Now at least we have an open source framework, that gives us hope for the future."

Sree Kotay, who was involved in the Viewpoint Media Player, moderates his views slightly: "The model, as with Postscript, and, quite frankly, Windows, is the 'Platform Effect' -- monetizing both the runtime (Postscript/Windows/Flash) and providing rich(er) enterprise level authoring tools and functions (Authoring tools, servers, etc.). Releasing the specifications and 'core' tools creates the illusion of freedom in tool chain, while actually delivering vendor lock-in -- which isn't necessarily a bad thing for developers if (a) there's runtime ubiquity, and (b) the developer's not on the hook for distribution costs."

Dana Gardner at ZDNet: "I was just telling Coach Wei of Nexaweb the other night that Adobe was being too arrogant, and that more exploitation of open source would make sense for them. Well, darned if it turns out I was making some sense, even after two beers and a crab taco at Fenway Park...." (Now I'll be thinking of crab tacos all day.... ;-)

Slashdot: "Adobe Open Sources Flex SDK Under MPL".

"Ted" at TechToolBlog: "Adobe Open sources Flex - Who Cares?" "This looks to be a Adobe's last ditch effort to save Flash aka to Sun open sourcing Java. There is a reason Flex has never taken off, Adobe sucks at writing tools & programming languages/API for developers. Macromedia was bad (see Actionscript), Adobe is worse. Some companies can compete with Microsoft in terms of IDE & programming languages (Borland does a decent job) but Adobe is not one of them. Not to mention their Eclipse based IDE is not part of the open source release." (Not to mention that I'm still thinking about crab tacos....)

Andre Charland wins Most Melodious Title award: "Flex is Open Sourced, Heyo!"

John Newton: "I was flabbergasted when Adobe wrote me earlier this week to ask me for a quote for their move to open source Flex...." Contains an intro to Flex, and examples, for those not yet familiar with it.

Jay Fortner at Read/WriteWeb reprises the news, and will likely draw comments throughout the day.

Ed Burnette (link in prior linklist) is dropping identical comments on many, many weblogs saying "it's just a first step doesn't mean much", then linking to his ad revenue on ZDNet.

"Michael" at "Programming and politics" is skeptical, offering hamburger-stand metaphors. Snippet: "First, to take advantages of its greatest strengths (continuous, bidirectional communication between client and server) required a proprietary Adobe server. Second, the development tools were also proprietary. It's hard to quickly prototype something in Flex, unless you've already made an investment in it."

"Matt" at PeerPressure riffs off the Brendan Eich piece, and draws up transcripts of XUL/MXML intertranslation made during the Tamarin donation. (btw, I'm putting quotes on these first names because the blog pages don't list full names and I'm in too much of a rush to do a WHOIS search to properly credit the uncredited writers.)

Dana Blankenhorn sees this as "A sign of desperation from Adobe". Might be a sign of desperation about something else.... (I think "plaintiff" might have been intended as "plaintive".)

At the top of the Digg Tech list.

I'm going to take a break, get dressed and go into the office... another pass later.

---