Nate Beck – Adobeholic

Joan announced yesterday about, A Public Forum For the Flex Community Tomorrow.

There has been some good and bad feedback regarding the open source aspects of the Flex SDK and the team has decided to go out into the community to hear your thoughts. You can call in to air your concerns or share ideas.

Lately there has been a big upheaval throughout the Flex community dealing with the Fx prefixes in Flex 4. I’m not going to get into it here, but long story short… many people in the community aren’t happy about it.

Even though the Flex SDK is “open source”, it is still tightly controlled by Adobe. All of the planning, new features, all the decisions reside within Adobe. There is the Flex Bug System and it accepts feature requests from the community, which they take into account… but let’s face it, it’s a weak solution.

Today, I had the opportunity to attend the forum. It was absolutely a step in the right direction. Sure, they might have ticked some people off… Nobody likes being told, “This is how we are going to do it, and you have no choice”. That’s not what open source software is about. Sure, it might be too late to take the Fx prefix out of Gumbo… but at least Adobe came to their senses and realized that the community is as vested in this technology as they are.

From my own personal experience… there is a certain disappointment that comes when you’ve invested your own time to contribute to the Flex SDK just to have it deferred or ignored. We’re not being paid to build these things. Don’t take this blog post as a complaint about Adobe or the Flex SDK team, it’s not meant to be that at all. I just think that if Adobe trusts more in the community we can build something amazing.

I think it would be a great thing for Adobe to promote select community members… invite them into planning and discussions, assign features and bugs to them, involve them in decision making. I can rattle off a list of people who would love to be involved on that level with the Flex SDK, me being one of them.

I said it during the meeting, and I’ll say it again. The Flex SDK team should realize that even though it’s their full-time job to make this platform the best it can be.. for a lot of us, it’s our full-time job dealing with the decisions that are made.

:: Update ::

The recording is now available.

Additional Links

Jesse Warden’s thoughts on the issue
Tom Chiverton’s thoughts on the talk