Adobe is Being Disingenuous with Flex Developers

What is more preferable? Adobe axing Flex and just shelving it as just another discontinued proprietary product or Adobe axing Flex and giving anybody with a vested interest the opportunity to pick it up where Adobe left off and take it further?

Or more succinctly...

Pick one:

Flex is dead! Rest in Peace!

Flex is dead! Long live Flex!

Agreed.

I don't particularly care for Adobe, but I definitely feel like they are taking the high road with this decision. How may other companies would simply leave their customers high and dry? At least this way anyone that is committed to Flex can choose between continuing with an open source environment or transitioning away. And they'll have flexibility (no pun intended) while doing so.

Would the author prefer that Adobe simply rip the rug out from under the users?

Adobe is dying.

I have this uneasy feeling that we're going to see a replay of Sun.

Just as long as they're not bought by Oracle, or God forbid, M$...

or God forbid, M$...

With their cash reserves, it isn't out of the realm of possibility. Top tier MS execs might want to do it just to increase their leverage against open source but in this case, I don't think the shareholders OR the Directors would stand for it. This move could conceivably be a boot on the throat of Linux, but again...thankfully they have to answer to others.

Adobe has several product lines that don't seem to be doing so hot, but they have others that seem to be doing just fine: Photoshop, and some of their other graphics tools, seem to be doing great even with OSS competition from Gimp and Inkscape. The question is if that's enough to keep them going with some of their web-based product lines going south. If it were a private company, it shouldn't be a problem, they'd just downsize, but public companies never seem to do that; if they can't continuously grow, then they collapse somehow, either breaking apart or getting bought out. I sure hope MS doesn't buy them; there's too much consolidation in the software industry as it is, and no company is more OSS-unfriendly than them. Oracle would be much better; at least if Oracle bought them out, all they'd do is incompetently mismanage them into the ground, rather than using them as a way to harm OSS with patent attacks and intentional incompatibility.

Yes, Photoshop is doing extremely well, even considering that probably 60%+ of Photoshop installations are pirated copies (conservative estimate, & completely without any source, just my own anecdotal observation). I actually believe that if Adobe tried too hard to crack down on piracy, it would have the reverse effect of pushing more people to the open source alternatives. But, I'm unsure of your assessment of Oracle's non belligerent motivations... I rather think they are just as hostile as M$ is against OSS, just more inclined to wrap their services with OSS delivery platforms.

JaseP wrote:I rather think they are just as hostile as M$ is against OSS

Citation needed. Please show any instances where Oracle has done anything to harm OSS. I can't think of even one. With MS, it's been "Linux is a cancer", "GPL is pac-man-like", secret SCO lawsuit funding, patent attacks, all manner of FUD, I could go on and on. What has Oracle done? Nothing. Where is all this Oracle hatred coming from anyway? Oracle is about as dangerous to OSS as PeopleSoft.

Quoting:Where is all this Oracle hatred coming from......

The same place the Canonical/mark shuttleworth hatred comes from, would be my guess.

@Grishnakh: "Where is all this Oracle hatred coming from anyway?"

I think the OpenOffice debacle is fresh in everyone's minds and probably the basis of this feeling.

Oracle (or should I say Larry) is aggressive in the software industry but I don't think they take quite same stance regarding open source software.

For the moment, it serves their business to embrace open source but I have no doubt that they would turn on an open source project if it competed seriously with their core markets.

Oracle Open Source hostility:

OpenOffice debacle, patent positions related to Java, the essential forking of Virtual Box based on hardware support, ad nauseum...

Oracle is, at best, a fair weather friend to open source... I trust them as much as I trust M$.