14 DAY TRIAL // The news that Adobe will open-source the SDK for Flex RIA development environment and documentation under the MPL (Mozilla Public License) is still hot. The open-sourcing of Flex will allow full access to the developers at the source code who can this way extend it and contribute to the improvement of the Flex compiler, components and application framework.
A week later, sources close to Microsoft unveil a similar strategy to be followed by the giant from Redmond. Although Microsoft refused to make any comments related to this, sources familiar to the company's plans claim that some of the source code belonging to Silverlight technology will be released at MIX 07 this week along with a beta release of Silverlight, a browser plug-in allowing websites to offer video and interactive media interfaces. If this is true, and everything goes as stated, this could mean an important step in the development of the open source concept, as more and more companies could follow the example given by Adobe, and continued by Microsoft, significant players on the software market.
Another surprise Microsoft could bring at the MIX 07 might be the Expression toolset for building RIAs (rich Internet applications), as sources claim, even though I'm not sure of how this is possible as the initial schedule shows more months to work on the tool, and the earliest term for the Expression release would be the end of June.
Expression is wanted to be a solid tool that would compete with Creative Suite 3 recently released by Adobe. Even though Microsoft is best known due to desktop applications such as Office, its interest in developing RIAs applications could prove to be a success.