Flexible Rails

By now, you're probably aware that Adobe open sourced Flex under the MPL.

If not, the FAQ and a Robert Scoble PodTech interview with Ely Greenfield and David Wadhwani is a good place to start.

As a Flex developer, this is absolutely great news. It's also great news for the Flex + Rails combination: this should enable Flex to have broader appeal to the Rails community. (Some won't be happy until the Flash player is open source, of course.) However, my take on it is that this is a huge step forward: the Flash player has such a massive installed base that it is a defacto standard--and now the framework of choice for creating Rich Internet Applications that run on the Flash player is Open Source.

Furthermore, it's just great that Flex is being released under the MPL: this license, like that of Rails, is very commercial-software-friendly -- much more so than the GPL. So you can happily build commercial products that extend Flex without the viral license fears of the GPL. (Legal disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer; get your own legal advice. This is just my blog.)

This is a great day to be a Flex developer!

Woo hoo!