If any enterprise has much to gain from open source, it's Adobe. The company has long demonstrated an uncanny ability to mimic many of the best distribution methodologies associated with open source, making its Flash and PDF/Acrobat technologies ubiquitous (and charging for software used to deploy it, convert it, etc.). It's therefore very gratifying to see the company take the next step and open source a signif If any enterprise has much to gain from open source, it’s Adobe. The company has long demonstrated an uncanny ability to mimic many of the best distribution methodologies associated with open source, making its Flash and PDF/Acrobat technologies ubiquitous (and charging for software used to deploy it, convert it, etc.).It’s therefore very gratifying to see the company take the next step and open source a significant body of software, Flex, as the company announced today. Adobe Systems Incorporated today announced plans to release source code for Adobe® FlexTM as open source. This initiative will let developers worldwide participate in the growth of the industry’s most advanced framework for building cross-operating system rich Internet applications (RIAs) for the Web and enabling new Apollo applications for the desktop. The open source Flex SDK and documentation will be available under the Mozilla Public License (MPL). Available since June 2006, the free Adobe Flex SDK includes the technologies developers need to build effective Flex applications, including the MXMLTM compiler and the ActionScriptTM 3.0 libraries that make up the popular Flex framework. Together, these elements provide the modern, standards-based language and programming model used by leading businesses such as BMC Software, eBay, salesforce.com, Scrapblog, and Samsung to create RIAs deployed on the ubiquitous Adobe Flash® Player. This isn’t the first open source move that Adobe has made, of course. Gloria Chen, James Ward, and other “Adobans” have been working behind the scenes on this and other projects for at least a year. It has previously contributed the ActionScript Virtual Machine to the Mozilla Foundation under the Tamarin project, the use of the open source WebKit engine in the “Apollo” project, and the release of the full PDF 1.7 specification for ISO standardization. But this move strikes me as a foundational, company-defining decision. Sure, open sourcing Creative Suite or Acrobat would be bigger news, but I know from experience how hard it is to shift a company overnight, or even over several years (even when, as was the case with Novell, the company dearly wants to make the change). This is a stake in the ground that marks Adobe becoming an open source savvy and friendly company. I don’t expect the company to change overnight, but I do expect Flex to offer it valuable experience in building and working within an open source community. This will be invaluable as it mulls over open source’s future within the company.“Welcome to the social,” Adobe. Few companies have as much to gain from open source as you, and few understand the power and mechanics of ubiquity as you do. This move, I hope, will be the first in a long series of maneuvers to make your sense of style omnipresent and affordable through open source. Btw, this move is an example of how friendly outside pressure can help a company to make a decision it has long considered. As John Newton explains, Alfresco (and I’m sure many others) urged Adobe to do this over the last few months. In talking with an Adobe person yesterday who played a role in this move, he told me that outside pressure helped to tilt the balance in favor of opening up. He had been advocating it for awhile, but having others from outside the company suggesting it was a good idea helped, too. So there you have it: this blog will continue to urge companies to open up. Anything I can do to help…. 🙂 Open Source