Adobe just announced that it will open source Flex under the MPL license.

I find this quite funny since when Flex was initially released you had to go through a stringent selection process before you were even granted a free developer license. At that time they judged that Bla-bla List didn't meet the requirements and my plans to create an alternative open-source version in Flex as a comparison couldn't go through.

When people have been asking me about Flex at conferences, I've been saying that to be successful it will have to be open-sourced. It seems they eventually realized that nowadays this is a requirement for any development platform. Kudos to Adobe for that.

Sadly, this will now make it even more difficult for OpenLaszlo to defend its case. I still think that it's a superior solution since the programming language is much closer to what people are used to in Javascript development. Also, the fact that OpenLaszlo now supports multiple runtime environments such as DHTML and soon JavaME, is a major bonus. However, going up against the huge Adobe marketing machine will now be any even more difficult task.