Why Flex SDK is free and Flash CS4 not ? Where is the trick?

Question

Why Flex SDK is free and Flash CS4 not ? Where is the trick ?

Answer 1

It's not a trick. "Flex" is an SDK for building Flash applications with MXML. You can download the SDK and compile swfs using the command line tool mxmlc. Adobe doesn't make money off of swfs; they make it off their development tools. Hence, they charge for the Flash IDE and the Flex Builder IDE (now called Flash Builder). Flash allows you to visually lay out and animate using the timeline. The more reasonably priced Flex Builder (it's not the Flex SDK, it uses the Flex SDK though) has a solid debugger and support for visually laying out MXML components.

Answer 2

This is more or less like asking why AJAX is free but Dreamweaver isn't. Adobe doesn't sell frameworks, but they do sell tools that can be used to build content using frameworks.