Adobe brings AIR to Linux, joins Linux Foundation
Adobe Systems on Monday is expected to release an alpha version of AIR on Linux and announce that it is joining the Linux Foundation.
AIR is Adobe's software for running and creating Web applications that run both online and offline. AIR 1.0, released late last month, runs on Windows and Mac OS. Adobe had said it will port AIR to Linux and then mobile devices.
As part of the AIR-on-Linux release, Adobe is making an update to the alpha version of its Flex Builder framework for Linux. Both will be made available at Adobe Labs for free and will be completed later this year.
Adobe said that it joined the Linux Foundation to help promote rich Internet application development on Linux. It's a bid to raise its commitment to Linux-based software on the desktop, where it's support until now has been limited.
Google is sponsoring programmers at CodeWeavers who are using Wine to write a Linux version of Photoshop and other Creative Suite applications.
Adobe has also sought to work with open-source software more, in general. It has open-sourced development tools, including its Flex development framework, and contributed a scripting engine to the Mozilla Foundation for inclusion in the Firefox Web browser.
Martin LaMonica is a senior writer for CNET's Green Tech blog. He started at CNET News in 2002, covering IT and Web development. Before that, he was executive editor at IT publication InfoWorld. E-mail Martin. 
and we all know that .Net developers are color blind geeks. they
know very little about rich media - color, sound, music and so on..
keep on dreaming...
And for a Linux / Unix world, a command name is regarded as special because it is not only a mere name but also includes lots of background things like culture and history (as you can see in 'sed', 'grep', 'awk' etc..).
Adobe, unfortunately, has named their Flash development environment 'Flex' Builder. However, Linux has already 'flex' command and it is evolved from one of the oldest UNIX applications 'lex', which many core developers has used to make a compiler itself.
To use 'flex' to denote their own applications would be regarded as not having enough respect towards Linux culture, which Adobe certainly would not want.
Adobe should reconsider this before spending some money on the foundation. Linux has never been a profit-driven movement, and sometimes things like culture, naming conventions, and philosophy are far more important to gain respect in the Linux community.
I'm sure the number of users outraged about the use of the work 'flex' totals in at around ... 1 give or take 0.
I for one applaud Adobe. Good job. Being a developer its good to know if AIR takes off I wont be punished as a Linux user.
For this I congratulate them.
No one expects them to open Photoshop but they have opened/donated some of their code and shown a willingness to work according to the rules that govern open source.
Redmond should take not how this is done.
Again, no one is FLOSS is asking for them to GPL Photoshop but to work on common goals that can benefit them as well as other companies.
Both BlazeDS and Flex were released under some GPL variant.
Adobe also uses SQLite and Eclipse in their projects and the Tamarin code they donated can be found in the Mozilla CVS repository.
Their XMP Toolkit is available also available under the BSD license.
These are just the ones that I know of.
Those of us who work in the FLOSS world are often quick to criticize but its also important that with give out the bouquets as well.
Its not hard for a proprietary company to work with the FLOSS world... IF IT WANTS TO.
For all the faults we can find with them, Adobe has shown it does want to.
- should be sooner
- by Rudi Rusdiah March 31, 2008 8:38 PM PDT
- Glad to hear finally Adobe join the Open source and make its products cheaper for the community...
- Reply to this comment
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(8 Comments)Many Adobe products are good but expensive and unaffordable in our region. In Indonesia there are many police raids and one of the object of raid is software from microsoft,adobe (photoshop, acrobat etc..), corel etc...By the way most of the software that are being raid are software that are included in the BSA ( business software alliances).
Hoping by joining the Open Source... we can have affordable software and avoiding from police raid
So, more of these global software join Open Source instead of only joining the BSA and WIPO.
Regards, Rudi Rusdiah - APWKomitel
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