Adobe Flex is a collection of technologies released by Adobe Systems for the development and deployment of cross platform rich Internet applications based on the proprietary Adobe Flashplatform. The initial release in March 2004 by Macromedia included a software development kit, an IDE, and a J2EE integration application known as Flex Data Services. Since Adobe acquired Macromedia in 2005, subsequent releases of Flex no longer require a license for Flex Data Services, which has become a separate product rebranded as LiveCycle Data Services.
In February 2008, Adobe released the Flex 3 SDK under the open source Mozilla Public License.Adobe Flash Player, the runtime on which Flex applications are viewed, and Adobe Flex Builder, the IDE built on the open source Eclipse platform and used to build Flex applications, remain proprietary.
Source : Wikipedia.org
