Adobe Flex now open source

I hadn't paid much attention to Adobe's Flex, but the announcement that Adobe is releasing the Flex libraries under the Mozilla Public License caught my attention. Instead of being a boring proprietary play for developers to work on Flash, this is a rather arousing engagement of the open source world.

The promise of Flex, as part of the Apollo Project, is that it will be a platform-independent development platform for Web 2.0-style applications with rich UI, no installation footprint (for applications, obviously not for the Flash player) and, perhaps most interestingly, disconnected use scenarios.

Currently there's no way to make your AJAX applications work offline. Yes, you can get halfway there, but once you lose your browser state you lose your work. So if you disconnect you'd better not lose power until you connect again. This is a real barrier, as anyone who works in online applications knows. Browser developers and others are working on solutions for this, which is essentially the last mile for full Web 2.0 adoption.

So, the MPL is a fascinating choice of licenses. It gives Adobe the advantages of a weak copyleft to keep a commercial developer from stealing their cookies, but still allows software developers to ship their product without giving up their own code.

Before you go thinking that Adobe has gone all communist on us, they are not talking about open-sourcing the Flash player. That may not matter too much, as the Flash player is now available on the three top platforms (Windows, Mac, Linux) but it does keep it from spreading to unexpected platforms like Symbian or BSD or whatever. As far as a mixed licensing model goes, it's kind of the converse of what Sun did with Java (GPL runtime and compiler, proprietary libraries).

My guess is that Adobe plans to follow the gold rush business model and get rich on the tools, much as they did with Adobe Acrobat. It's a departure for them, as their core customer base has never been geeky Windows or Unix developers but instead tattooed and pierced cool kids who develop websites on their Macs. They're losing their grip on the PDF market, and I guess this is their way to strike out into a blue ocean. (Apologies for further propagating that cliché.)