After casting a pall on the future of Flash by canceling any further development of Flash on mobile devices last week, Adobe has abandoned its Flash-based Flex application SDK to the tender mercies of the Apache Software Foundation (ASF), reinforcing the idea that Flash is ultimately toast, burned by rival HTML5, a posthumous victory for Steve Jobs who openly loathed Adobe’s stuff. Flash’s future looks bleaker still considering Flex can build both desktop and mobile apps. The Apache Foundation will have to vote on whether it will take Flex and its roadmap under its wing. Flex has been open source since 2008 but will have to shift out from under Adobe’s control and be managed as an independent project.

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