Adobe Flex coming to the Apache Software Foundation?

I sense a pattern: after Google Wave (remember?), OpenOffice.org, Symphony and so on now Adobe seem to have plans to donate Flex to the Apache Software Foundation. I was looking yesterday at the Spoon Projects homepage, were I got the impression that Flex will go to there. But now even there the announcement has changed: Spoon will coop with Adobe on Apache Flex.

Interestingly, they have compared the PhoneGap donation with the Flex donation. While Adobe Flex has been suffering heavily from the recent announcements of mobile Flash death, PhoneGap (now called ApacheCallbackCordova) is a modern and very promising framework. Good marketing - this is called “creating an anchor” in psychology. Actually this situation leaves a bit of a bad taste on my tongue: is the Apache Software Foundation becoming some kind of the big companies software attic?

Adobe responds to the question, if they move Flex to the ASF to die:

“Absolutely not – we are incredibly proud of what we’ve achieved with Flex and know that it will continue to provide significant value for many years to come. We expect active and on-going contributions from the Apache community. To be clear, Adobe plans on steadily contributing to the projects and we are working with the Flex community to make them contributors as well.”

At the ASF the community decides which projects they want to develop and which they don’t want. This might mean, Flex will have some kind of a future at the ASF - until Flash dies (and of course the Adobe Air runtime). Actually Adobe is more interested in HTML5 now, which does not really help Flex. So - can they expect on going contributions from the ASF community? How many people will have an interest in participating a project which already has the smell of decay?

Who knows.

In addition to Flex, Adobe wants to donate BlazeDS. From the description it reads as this is one of the core technologies from the failed “Adobe Wave” project (for which I actually wrote a WordPress plugin back then).

So far no proposal has been arrived at the Apache Incubator. So far there is no vote in progress and actually that means we can relax and watch the show.