Amit, I've voiced my concerns around the runtime a few times, both in the incubator mailing lists, and in this mailing list. http://old.nabble.com/-PROPOSAL--Flex-for-Apache-Incubator-to33005429.html#a33012665 http://markmail.org/search/?q=+list%3Aorg.apache.incubator.flex-dev+avm
Roy Fielding said in his presention at the Flex Summit (http://tv.adobe.com/watch/flex-community-summit-december-2011/what-it-means-to-be-an-apache-project-part-2/) that he considers the JVM just as proprietary as the Adobe AVM. Apache didn't have a good experience with Oracle/Sun and the Apache Harmony project, which probably explains his feelings towards the JVM. But I have to disagree. The advantage of the JVM is that you have a large number of companies building JVMs, for both desktops, servers and mobile. But back to Flex and the ASF: It seems that Apache Flex is mainly focused on working on the Apache Flex framework, and does want to leave a discussion around the single-vendor dependence of Apache Flex out. That's a community decision, and the motivation is probably that most people working on the project a) want a future for Flex, b) want to see something positive happening quickly (first Apache Flex release), b) have products depending on Flex, and the current setup of Apache Flex is still much better form them than the situation in late 2011. Roy Fielding said as well, that the "Main benefit of open source is independence of any particular vendor". That doesn't fit in well with Apache Flex, since there's a lot of project dependency on a single vendor - in my eyes. My idea was to define a high-level goal of an alternative runtime for the project, but that's not how Apache projects work: No roadmap, no high-level goals. I'd say that's a limitation of what you can do within an ASF project, since it will be relatively difficult to "plan" a product with this approach, but without this approach there might be roadmaps and plans, but nothing gets done. Read the first paragraph on the page describing the ASF: http://www.apache.org/foundation/ "The Apache Software Foundation provides organizational, legal, and financial support for a broad range of open source software projects. The Foundation provides an established framework for intellectual property and financial contributions that simultaneously limits contributors potential legal exposure. Through a collaborative and meritocratic development process, Apache projects deliver enterprise-grade, freely available software products that attract large communities of users. The pragmatic Apache License makes it easy for all users, commercial and individual, to deploy Apache products." Nothing is being said about open standards, and that the software created through ASF should only support open runtime environments. ASF makes sure that a company cannot influence a project DIRECTLY by having a group of employees control an ASF project, based on what Roy Fielding said. And if the ASF board does not oppose the influence Adobe has on Flex by the dependency on Flash Player and ActionScript (something the community cannot vote on), it's ASF's decision. As a community member, you can either accept the current situation and support Apache Flex, or decide you don't like the setup and not do it. - Raju At the same time I sympathize with all developers wiling to make something happen for Apache Flex, and hope that the vendor dependency Flex has can be resolved at some time in the future.
