Per Olesen published a blog recently entitled, Flash is Still Closed Source and Proprietary Technology, where he argues that Flash is still a proprietary platform.
We can easily be mislead by all the sudden openness from Adobe. But please remember, that the Flash Player, which is the key enabler for all of Flex, is still closed source and even a very closed community.Olesen starts out by pointing out that that the Flex SDK is Open Sourced, but notes:
Flex is “just” a library of classes and components, that one can use to build flash applications with, combined with an SDK and an IDE based on Eclipse.Olesen does continue on the proprietary issues:
Another problem is the fact that all the flex applications in the world are nothing, without the Flash Player being available in its newest version on the needed platform.InfoQ.com recently ran a piece on the Top 10 Flex Misconceptions, where Adobe’s James Ward attempted to address this concern:
The core of Flash Player is the Tamarin Virtual Machine, which is an open source project under Mozilla. While the SWF file format is not fully open, it is documented by the community on osflash.org. There are numerous open source products that read and write SWF files. The Flash Player's product direction has traditionally been heavily influenced by the community and their needs. The core language for Flash Player is an implementation of ECMAScript 262, which is the specification for JavaScript. Flex also uses CSS for styling of components / applications. Adobe AIR uses web standards as the basis for desktop applications as well as Open Source technologies like Tamarin, Webkit, and SQLite.Is the proprietary nature of the Flash Player keeping you or your company from using Adobe Flex for application development? If you currently think of the Flash Player as a closed platform, do the thoughts from the Adobe team impact your perception?