I am a huge advocate of utilizing free and open source software when ever its possible. With that I was very excited that Adobe gave us the Flex 2 SDK for free. And to be honest, when the pricing for Flex Builder was announced I thought it was pretty high for an “Eclipse Plugin”.

As a Eclipse user, and an evangelist for the CFEclipse plugin, I am very familiar with how plugins work. I have used many (probably close to a 100) different eclipse plugins for an array of development challenges. Some of those were free. Some were oss. Some of them (MyEclipse in particular) I have purchased and recommend openly.

I can honestly say that Flex Builder 2 is the most impressive eclipse product i have ever seen. I have purchased a copy for use on my PC at work, and between the debugger and class introspection features I think it was worth every penny.

As I sit here tonight working on my powerbook, writing mxml with a generic xml plugin and compiling my flex apps with ant, I was considering what I would do or even pay to have those features right now.

To that end, while IM’ing with a buddy tonight, I proposed that I might be willing to amputate one of my special man pieces in order to earn this bit of software. To which my very dear friend replied: “dude, i’d join adobe, for free, to work on that, just to laugh when you had to cut your own left nut off.”

And so I thank Adobe for their continued work on the Flex Builder for Mac. And hope it doesn’t turn to me removing peices of my body to get a copy.