Turns out Adobe hates to see The Man bringing you down — where “The Man” means the economy, and “you” means developers that are down on their luck — so the company is giving away Flex Builder 3 Professional for free to any developer willing to show they are unemployed. That’s $699 worth of software for free. Holy crap.

Sure, this is a really nice thing to do for software developers that need to expand their skill base so they have a better chance at landing a job, but it’s also a win for Adobe because there’ll be more Flex developers out in the wild, and potentially ultimately more companies that can develop Flex-based applications with all of those freshly trained coders.

The catch? You can’t use your free copy of Flex Builder for production or commercial purposes. Still, you’ll be able to hone your Flex skills without having to shell out any cash.

You can score your copy of Flex Builder 3 Professional at the Adobe Web site.