Over the last few years, Adobe has taken a number of steps to entice a broad range of enterprise developers to use the Flex development platform, including major moves toward openness around the platform with the Open Screen project and the open sourcing of the Flex SDK and Blaze Data Services project. With all Adobe's extra work to court open source minded developers, it is surprising to hear the rumblings this week about the end of Flex Builder Linux.
Radek Gruchalski quotes Adobe's Ben Forta as saying the following about the current state of the Flex Builder Linux project:
"there is not enough requisition for the product to continue its development."
There is no official statement from Adobe, but labs.adobe.com shows the last Flex Builder Linux release as an alpha release in August, 2008. With the last release more than 8 months ago, there is little reason to believe the project is active. Tom Chiverton shares his thoughts on the importance of Flex Builder Linux:
This is very bad news for anyone who uses Linux to produce Flex content, as the existing build on Adobe Labs is incomplete, even compared to the existing Flex Builder 3 product. It's also not been updated very much, and certainly not recently (there are funny manual steps required to get the latest Flex SDK and AIR working with it, for instance). I dread to think how much further behind it will be allowed to drift if this report is true, and so I've logged a formal bug with Adobe.
How does the InfoQ community view Adobe's apparent choice to stop Flex Builder Linux development? With a number of thought leaders using Linux, will this affect the adoption of the Flex platform?
For those interested in voicing your opinion with Adobe, you can vote for Flex Builder Linux at: http://bugs.adobe.com/jira/browse/FB-19053