Open source?

Last year I needed to generate printable reports for a commercial project. I quickly realized that printing in Flex was no different from printing in Flash. And Flash isn’t exactly known for its printing capabilities.

I delivered the project, and I then decided that there were a few components I should extend more so they could be reused in future projects, and printing was the part that took me longer and brought most unexpected issues (issues that I really didn’t want to deal with again).

After a few days I had a prototype of a reporting framework for Flex. I thought it could be really useful to others, and it should be released to the public. And FlexReport was born.

A few months have passed and I’m really happy that I did open source FlexReport. I’ve received many bug reports, fixes and recently some contributions of new features. I’m about to release a new version and many of the improvements were not made by me or are suggestions I received. By open sourcing FlexReport I donated many hours of my work, but in return it is much better than it’d be if I just kept it for my own projects.

My point is: open source is good!

It’s good for those who release them, as they get developers and beta testers for free.

It’s good for users. Open source projects tend to having active user communities helping each other. You’ll probably get better and faster support on these kind of projects then on most commercial products.

It’s good for contributors. If you fix a bug, implement new features, make some kind of improvement to a open source project you should contribute it. Not only as a retribution for hard work other people offered you, but also to make the product you use better.

I’d like to thank all the people who contributed to FlexReport