Adobe open-sources Flex under the MPL — a good second step. Congratulations to all the people who made it happen.
My browser-war battle-heightened senses tell me you’ll see more open-sourcing, and no small amount of “openness” hype, from several big players in the coming days. As we mozilla.organs learned the hard way, getting the license right and hosting the code in a public repository are not enough (no pixie dust).
Successful open source projects combine meritocratic leadership, “doing” more than “talking”, and breadth through well-scoped extension mechanisms. It’s not enough to do great work by oneself: each committer who has the stamina and remains engaged must spend time listening to users and developers, grooming helpers and successors, and refactoring or even redesigning to support what becomes, module by module, a platform.
Platforms are for applications to stand upon, for building higher tiers of platform, and ultimately (in my view) for enabling user innovation. Mozilla’s platform has at least three tiers: Web, XUL, Gecko-embedded. Firefox has addons as a tier distinct from those.
Of course, closed-source platforms exist, but the successful ones hold up so much code that they end up de-facto standards, and often go open-source just to reduce costs born by the proprietor (there are better reasons than that, don’t get me wrong).
One way of evaluating Adobe’s success in open-sourcing Flex will be to look for more than just added components and widgets, and discern higher-level as well as different platform tiers. For instance, would patches to add a web-targeted compiler back end, in addition to the Flash Player SWF-targeted back end that’s there now, be accepted if they were developed?
Or how about harmonizing XUL and MXML, making changes to underlying layout and widget models on both sides in order to converge the two, so that (with trivial XML vocabulary translation) MXML could be interpreted by browsers that support XUL, as well as compiled into a SWF bound for the Flash Player?
For many observers and fans, an open-source Flash Player is the holy grail. If that is coming, it will probably take a while. But there’s a small and (I think) rising chance that “openness” competition among big players will speed up the trend at Adobe.
Then what? Obviously, forked and fragmented Player variants are not helpful, and the main distribution will be the contested ground. A better Flash Player via open-source development would be fine: good not great.
Blending Flash code into multiple browser rendering pipelines, with seamless text input (including focus) and output, an integrated DOM, full and fast scripting, and unified CSS processing would be even better. Add high-quality, unencumbered <video>, and web-friendly 3D (including an LOD-capable scene-graph model, rather than a bulky, eagerly created DOM), and you’re close to my idea of the promised land.
Adobe is moving in the right direction. That’s good enough for me today.