Adobe AIR on Linux: Pre-Beta Testers Needed

I plan to run and test on the Ubuntu desktop. I don’t plan to develop on Ubuntu really, since I love my Mac. Our company has some AIR apps (internal) already developed, in development, and on the drawing board – as always. :)

We’re primarily a Flex and Flash house. We use Mac OS X, Windows, and two of us use Ubuntu a little.

When will we see a 64bit version?

Funny, I just looked at their website yesterday to see if they had a linux version.
Glad to hear it’s in the works (finally).

I’ve been waiting for it since a while. It’s a great new!!!!!

is there any chance that air will ever be open sourced??

Hi James,

asdf seems to have lost his train of thought so I’ll answer for him.

I think the easiest way to see the benefits of source availability is look where it was already done. Firefox is conceptually similar to AIR in that it is a runtime environment that should be able to run and display content everywhere. There’s no doubt that Firefox benefited tremendously from being open-source:

– ported to many platforms
– well-integrated with native technologies on each platform
– extension development and optimization is aided by availability of source code
– wider and more effective security audits and faster fixes

I think AIR can equally enjoy each of these benefits. Users also benefit from being able to run a local patched version, for example to make it work better with their hardware (video / webcam / game controller / etc.)

Of course you can never predict what smart applications people will come up with once they can tinker with the code. Integration with composited desktops? Performance improvements in para-virtualized machines? Or some other cool idea we can’t even imagine now.

Any piece of code that you do not intend to sell and does not contain trade secrets becomes more useful and valuable when released as open source.

Uri

James,

You’re right of course. But I’m sure cross-platform consistency is just as important to Sun, and it still released the code to Java. That’s also the situation with Mozilla: even though the source code is available, the overwhelming majority still use the official Mozilla builds, and only a very small minority actually change the code and build their own version. Those that do probably do it for things like debugging HTML or extensions, profiling, and fixing bugs – changes that can be merged back upstream. You simply don’t see anyone offering their own modified Firefox version, because consistency is important to the users as well.

Likewise with AIR, I’m sure that almost everyone will choose to use Adobe’s official builds on all the supported platforms. The very few that don’t will probably do so for a good reason and will know they’re responsible if their client doesn’t work. The much bigger change is that AIR might be available on platforms Adobe did not intend to support, and while the port may not be perfect I think it’s still better overall than not having it available on those platforms at all.

I’m not saying open-sourcing AIR is essential, AIR is useful with or without the source code, it’s just a little more useful with it.

Uri

@Guest: You really help Linux community members look like serious technologists; right on leva.

@Everyone Who Cares: When I mentioned Linux is coming to AIR at a PHP-based conference recently people got pretty excited. I know this is a great step and a right step.