masuland

Well … this was a big one:

“Over the coming weeks Adobe and the Spoon Foundation will be working together to donate the Flex SDK to an established open source foundation.

The project will be jointly led by developers from the Flex SDK team, members of the Spoon Project, key developers from the community and contributors from enterprise companies using Flex.

Continued development will happen under this new governance model.

The Open Spoon Foundation board and officers are excited by these continued developments and looking forward to the collaboration. Details will be evolving rapidly, check back here for continued updates.”

see announcement of the Open Spoon Project:

http://www.spoon.as/2011/adobe-announces-intention-to-donate-flex-sdk/

I expected that this day would come in future, but, I did not expect it to come so soon. I hope that this decision will bring a positive new responsibility to this new growing Flex community and will hopefully be as effective as the Java open source community became in November 13, 2006:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_(programming_language)

If not, then I am seeing the risk that all Flash- and Flex-Developers have to go back to the past web browser war years which most of them hated and hoped they never have to go back again:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browser_wars

If yes, I am very curious about the future of the Flash Platform. Is the complete Flash Platform (Flash Player, Flash Pro, Flash Builder, Flash Catalyst) going to be open sourced within the next 10 years, too? What about Flex 5 running on Stage3D (Molehill)? What about Flash Catalyst CS6 or even later? Who will be responsible for the development of the Flashplayer, Flash Pro, Flash Builder and Flash Catalyst for the next 10 years?