Don't you just wish Rev would do this?

[Lynn Fredricks]

> > But I don't think open source is likely in the foreseeable future.
> > RunRev Ltd. and their backers have a lot invested in Rev, 
> and any path 
> > to the future would need to provide a healthy return on 
> that investment.
> 
> 
> Why would you say Adobe are open sourcing Flex? because they 
> don't see the product going anywhere and they are cutting 
> their losses? Because they are big enough and can loose on 
> this one? Or because they figure they can only really make 
> money off a development tool and platform (in the future) if 
> it has serious open source credentials and they are 
> reorganising their business bit by bit around ways of seeling 
> tools and services around such a strategy?

Adobe "owns" all of the best selling commercial tools for
producing/supporting content for the Flex platform. Flash and to a lesser
extent, AJAX type solutions have achieved dominance in their own space - its
become its own ecosystem in web development.

By open sourcing Flex, they still maintain dominance because so many people
will use their tools to generate Flex related stuff. Yet they also appeal to
open source/free software communities and can leverage any work generated
there as a result - that looks good to shareholders, too.

Something that works for one company (or even a group of companies) doesn't
necessarily mean the strategy is sound for everyone else - those strategies
are built with the structure of those companies in mind. I have had clients
and partners of clients that have emulated Apple or Microsoft for example -
and at best its helped not at all, at other times disasterous.

Best regards,

Lynn Fredricks
Worldwide Business Operations
Runtime Revolution Ltd
http://www.runrev.com