Reaction to Flash Builder on Linux cancellation

Submitted by Falken on

Well, you can't blame me for trying (by opening the official bug). Despite being the 2nd most popular, and fastest growing, platform for web development, Adobe have finally told us what their plans for their Flash Builder on Linux are: termination.
Clearly Adobe were not one for listening to their developers on this one, as it was the 2nd most voted for issue across all projects in the public issue tracker at the time the news was announced, ahead of serious problems with the Flash Player and cookies, for instance.

Personally I'm disappointed. A lot. But not surprised- despite the huge pro-Linux fan fare with which Flash Builder on Linux was launched, it's been clear for a couple of years now that it was being left to rot.
I've no idea why it was finally killed, but can't believe the official "we couldn't sell enough". Download statistics show nothing of the potential that was turned away by the way the project was treated post-launch.

Oh well. I'm moving to using the FDT beta now as I use too much other stuff in Eclipse to swap to IDEA (which will probably end up costing more than FDT4 too).

FDT will get my money. IDEA will get other peoples, and I'm sure some other people will go with FDT too.
Adobe won't get that money- over 600 votes in their issue tracker, times the purchase price, times the 1:10 ratio of people who didn't vote. Lots of money. More than a million dollars. Their loss !

Adobe missed out, and I've no idea how they plan to monitor "the usage of the Flex SDK by Linux developers" which Adobe's Flash Builder FAQ says is the primary means to restart the project. So I have to conclude it's fluff, and it's just not important enough to them.
Shame.

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