I'm feeling vaguely nauseous about doing it, but I'm going to defend Adobe. I've criticised Adobe a great deal in the past, but I think that Flash is slowly becoming a legitimately open platform.
The top-end Premium version of Flash Builder is indeed $699, but there's a version available for $249 and a perfectly good compiler available for bupkis. Adobe offer completely free Flash Builder licenses for students and unemployed developers. Beyond Adobe there's an excellent open source IDE for Windows (FlashDevelop), a very powerful proprietary IDE (FDT), Eclipse plugins and a TextMate bundle. There are several good free options for AIR developers.
Adobe have really been sweating it over the image of Flash amongst developers. They're still a long way from perfect, but they seem to really be sorting their act out. While they would very much like developers to buy their expensive IDEs, they certainly aren't obstructing competition. It would be nice if AIR went open source along with the Flex/Flash core SDK, but compared to Apple it's a very open platform.
I don't really have any disagreement with what you've said, but I don't see the value proposition for RIM in using an open platform that can be duplicated by one of the Android phones. It seems like an incredibly bad way to treat your current Java developers and provide no diferention. Putting your development future in a 3rd party's hands seems rather wrong.
The top-end Premium version of Flash Builder is indeed $699, but there's a version available for $249 and a perfectly good compiler available for bupkis. Adobe offer completely free Flash Builder licenses for students and unemployed developers. Beyond Adobe there's an excellent open source IDE for Windows (FlashDevelop), a very powerful proprietary IDE (FDT), Eclipse plugins and a TextMate bundle. There are several good free options for AIR developers.
Adobe have really been sweating it over the image of Flash amongst developers. They're still a long way from perfect, but they seem to really be sorting their act out. While they would very much like developers to buy their expensive IDEs, they certainly aren't obstructing competition. It would be nice if AIR went open source along with the Flex/Flash core SDK, but compared to Apple it's a very open platform.