Re: [PROPOSAL] Flex for Apache Incubator

On Tue, Dec 20, 2011 at 15:30, Raju Bitter <rajubitter@googlemail.com> wrote:
>...
> 2) Action Script Virtual Machine (AVM)
> In November 2006 Adobe open source the Flash Player Script engine:
> http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/press/mozilla-2006-11-07.html
> Is the source code of Tamarin still the current version of the Action Script
> Virtual Machine in Flash Player 11? If there is a new version of the AVM
> (2+), will that be contributed to the Apache Software Foundation as well?
>
> It doesn't really make sense to only contribute a compiler, if there is no
> open source implementation of a runtime/scripting engine available, but that
> might only be my personal view. If the community would decide to create a an
> open standards based runtime for Flex, would that mean the community would
> have to start from zero?

I think that's just your personal view :-)

There is a ton of open source code written to work against Oracle's
RDBMS, or Windows' .NET runtime, or Apple's iOS. I see no problem with
Apache Flex targeting a proprietary environment.

> 3) Commercial support for Apache Flex
> Does Adobe plan to offer support for an Apache Flex product? If yes, what
> kind of support would be planned. I read somewhere that Adobe will not offer
> any support for Flex 4.6+ to new customers, but I'm not sure, if that's
> still the current plan.

I think this is orthogonal/unrelated to the Apache Flex proposal.

> 4) Flash Player
> Are there any plans to open source a stripped-down version of Flash Player,
> e.g. the discontinued version of Flash Player for mobile) in the future
> (similar to the pure open source Flex SDK vs. the commercial SDK)? The
> Apache community could continue working on a browser-based mobile runtime
> for Apache Flex, if that was the case.

Likewise.

> I hope I don't sound to skeptical here, but Adobe Flex is quite different
> from most Apache projects I've been in contact with. It's a powerful
> compiler with an interesting language, but it looks like the output of the
> compiler can only be used with Adobe-owned proprietary software at the
> moment.

As I mentioned above, I don't see this as a problem whatsoever. And
even if *some* people have a problem with it, there is a huge
committer list of people who obviously have zero problem with that
fact. The Foundation is here to provide support to communities, rather
than block them on philosophical rationales. (IMO :-) So if a
community wants to build up around Apache Flex, then we do what we can
to help them.

Cheers,
-g

---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: general-unsubscribe@incubator.apache.org
For additional commands, e-mail: general-help@incubator.apache.org