Adobe Joins Linux Foundation, Develops AIR For Linux

2muchcoffeeman writes "Adobe announced Monday that it is joining the Linux Foundation and alpha-released a Linux version of its new Adobe Internet Runtime environment, which allows Internet-enabled applications to run on Windows and Mac OS desktops, for Linux. According to Adobe, the alpha version lacks some key features that will be available in the final product and only runs with Sun Java, not GNU Java. Adobe also released an alpha of Flex Builder for Linux Monday."

Comments

Excellent news.

[l-ascorbic]

This is excellent news. We've never had the resources to port our panoramic image stitcher to Linux, but as it's now an AIR app, this means we get it for free. I can finally use my own app on Ubuntu! Anyone who hasn't taken a look at AIR yet should seriously check it out, especially now that Flex is open source.

Photoshop for Linux?

[l-ascorbic]

It may actually be possible to create a PDF viewer using AIR. It has some native support for the format, which means you may be able to create a lighter-weight app which uses this. Significantly, Adobe have said that they plan to move their apps gradually over to AIR, so this could mean that Photoshop and others may finally be available for Linux.

Just don't plan on trying to hack AIR

[2muchcoffeeman]

Here's the final paragraph of the PC World version of the story. It points out something else I found interesting ...

Although the Linux Foundation hailed Adobe's arrival as "a natural extension of its commitment to open standards and open source," that commitment stops short of publishing source code for the Linux version of Air. Adobe's end-user license for the code explicitly forbids any attempt to "reverse engineer, decompile, disassemble or otherwise attempt to discover the source code of the software."

In other words, "We'll let you play in our sandbox, but don't try to figure out how we built our sandbox so you can build your own sandbox that looks just like our sandbox."

Re:How is AIR different from, say java?

[l-ascorbic]

Like Dashboard, Gadgets etc, it's easy to develop simple AIR apps. This obviously means that there are a lot of those sort of apps available. This doesn't mean they all are. I may humbly submit my app as an example of a less basic one. It does panoramic image stitching, so has machine vision, image processing and that sort of stuff. Not the sort of thing you can do in Dashboard or Gadgets. Incidentally, I've released some of the image processing and maths stuff in our Actionscript library. It has support for bicubic and bilinear interpolation, histogram stretching, and a partial port of the JAMA matrix algebra library.

The flash format is a trap, careful

[cyberjessy]

From the SWF and FLV File Format Specification and License
-- This license does not permit the usage of the specification to create software which supports SWF file playback.

That's pathetic. Adobe is explicitly trying to control the _format_, while trying to convince (and confuse) people by releasing the runtime and SDK as open source. Which means they still retail all the control of closed-source software, without many people even being aware of it. Once (hopefully not) AIR or Flash becomes a widely accepted platform for applications, Adobe can easily ask people to pay up or do whatever.

These days, I get frustrated by the number of people who mention that Adobe is a major supported of open source, and get excited about it. Java may suck, but it sure is not a lock in.