Adobe announced last week its intentions to make Flex Blender, the tool for creating rich internet applications using ActionScript 3.0, free to students and faculty staff of qualifying educational institutes. The open source version of Flex has been available for a while, and now the full fledged version will also be available for free to many. It is clear that Adobe is experimenting with different strategies to expand the usage of Flex and its AIR platform in order to compete with the several new technologies such as AJAX, Google Gears, and Silverlight for bridging the gap between desktop and web based applications.

This free version of Flex to be released next month will probably be available only for students in North America and Europe.