Phil Costa on the advantages of going open source with Flex 3
In this interview Phil discusses the advantages of going with more of an open source model, the advantages of taking something that hasn’t been open source and open sourcing it.
There are a few different elements to it. First, there’s the nature of the product itself. The core part of the product is try hard to internally test, and get all the bugs out, because it’s a development framework. By its nature, it gets used in a million different ways. It’s very hard to actually set up tests for all those ways and to chase down all the bugs. So, more people looking at the code and suggest changes based on their particular use-case in one respect, and in the other it is a way of magnifying the QA resources, and also magnifying some of the bug-fixing resources.
The second element refers more to the evolution of the product. Having a group of people who can directly influence that or at least feel more deeply invested in it, is a good way to continue to evolve the product. With a developer product, the people who develop the product are also the users of the product, and there’s a very efficient feedback loop.
The third piece is more PR and marketing focused. Because people have
to make a substantial investment in Flex in terms of spending a lot
of time developing an application and then making their application
dependent on the Flex framework, therefore they’re looking for an open source
project or a set of standards. In the rich-ended application space,
there aren’t really any standards, per se. They’re mostly looking for
open source or de facto standards.
Phil also talks about:
- Background on the Adobe Flex SDK
- Why open-source the Flex SDK
- Risks in open-sourcing the Flex SDK
- Why the MPL license was chosen
- The risks of people forking the build
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