Adobe are offering a licence for Flex Builder 3 – its Eclipse-based web application development tool – completely free for any developer as long as they can prove they are unemployed.Details on the company's website (link below), Adobe are offering the license, which normally costs $699 (£480) providing applicants state they are “not currently employed or being paid to develop software applications or web pages,” and to provide “some basic information about previous work experience.”
There are restrictions on the offer, however: the license, for the Professional edition of Flex Builder 3, is for personal use only and must “not be used for production or commercial purposes.” Adobe is also restricting the resale rights, telling developers that the freebie cannot be “transferred to any other person or entity.”
That said, free is free: with the open-source Flex language proving popular in web development circles, anyone interested in improving their skills while they're temporarily between posts could do worse than to snag a copy at Adobe's expense.
It's not all generosity on Adobe's part, of course: the more developers that are skilled in Flex, the larger the market for the commercial editions of Flex Builder. Coupled with the non-production and non-transfer restrictions on the licence, as soon as a developer finds himself back in work it's a pretty much guaranteed sale.
Flex has been used by Wilson Sports and the Discovery Channel to create their websites...
Link to Adobe site...