The last threads about whether it would be good or not to create a virtual machine which moves FLEX from using the Adobe Flash Player or not, have made me spent many time thinking about the whole thing.
I think there are four points where the product need hard investment: 1. The said virtual machine. 2. A good, maintained and free (without cost) IDE for developers to work with FLEX. 3. FLEX evangelism and live support. 4. A bigger FLEX SDK full time commiters base. The thing is... those projects are heavy enough to fail if they are to be developed in a pure community driven context, as they would require full time dedicated people to get them live and working (in parallel to community free efforts). On the other hand, moving to a company to handle them delivers the community to the same situation that is suffering right now with Adobe placed at the base of the technology development. In fact, most people here work or owns companies which make profit or at least made profit by creating FLEX solutions, and I think we all here believe that it shoud be that way for the next years to come. The idea is: We could create an "I support FLEX" manifest that those companies and developers would sign to voluntarily commit to making regular donations to a foundation created to support and make real and maintaining alive those projects. The foundation goals would be: hiring programmers, analysts, product managers and so to maintain the 3 projects, which obviously will remain being open source Apache projects and mainly community driven. The scope here is not to become owners of the technology, but ensure that there is full time people working everyday on getting FLEX fit, hitting and running. Here in Paraguay we have very good portfolio of developers and a very low development hour costs rate, so it would be the right place to create such a foundation. Of course where comes and goes such received money, what the people is working on, is to be mandatory transparent as the foundation could only go on and work if the contributors are happy investing on it. Do you find interesting such an idea? Do you people think it would collect enough money to get those 4 development teams running and improving the technology? As I see it, it would be as if every company or developer working with flex and selling flex based solutions shared a flex development team which by the way would work for and only for them that are paying it. Should we work in developing the idea?
