Flex Builder

Adobe recently released Flex 3 with some interesting twists:
- Flex 3 SDK itself has been open sourced and is also free.
- FlexBuilder (the eclipse based IDE) is not free and comes in 2 flavors: Standard and Professional.

The standard version costs $249 (reasonable) but the Professional version costs significantly more $699 ($450 more than the standard version!!). The Professional version gets you the features from the standard version, along with the datagrid and charting components for data visualization, plus the testing and profiling tools.

I like that the Flex SDK has been open sourced. Adobe is definitely embracing the developer community and will certainly reap the rewards. However, I don't agree with how Adobe has bundled features (components and controls) along with the profiling and testing tools into a single product. Why should I have to buy the profiling and testing tools if I just want to use the controls? I understand that the richer controls are more complex and therefore should be priced more but why couldn't they give me just the data visualization controls for an additional $99 instead of having to pay $450 more for the tools I am not going to need? In this day and age when the industry is talking SAAS and paying by the feature, this is clearly a setback.

BTW, Flex Builder for Linux is on a different schedule and track and is still in alpha but (thankfully) is available as public alpha at Adobe Labs. No word on how they are going to price this yet.