Aral Balkan

Someone at CNet is probably not having a great time right now as I can't imagine that anyone enjoys being boiled alive by their boss. I am, of course, referring to the CNet News.com article titled Adobe to Release Flex Beta. According to my sources at Adobe, not only did CNet jump the gun on the announcement, sending the good folks on the Flex team scrambling to their blogs, but they also got most of the facts wrong.

For example, the Flex Builder tool will be priced under $1,000, *not* at $1,000 per developer.

More importantly, they apparently misreported the price of Flex Enterprise Services (FES). According to sources at Adobe, there will be a free version of FES made available and I am told that this, although limited by a certain number of concurrent users, is not a developer version. In other words, you should be able to deploy applications using it.

In my previous post, I quoted the price stated for FES in the CNet article as an example of where we should not be heading with regards to Flex 2 pricing and I am very relieved to hear that we apparently are not heading in this direction after all. The bulk of that post was actually written prior to these latest announcements and, although the convictions stated therein hold true, it is great to see that Adobe appears to be on the ball with this.

So, to recap, we're getting:

• Free Flex framework and compiler licenses
• Reasonably priced, kick-ass visual development tool
• A free Flash Enterprise Services license with pricing yet-to-be-announced on clusterable versions and/or versions with higher concurrent user limits.

Well, I have to say that I am going to go to bed a happy camper tonight. If I actually get to bed tonight, that is! :)