Blog:

Lately, I've been spending a fair amount of time working with our engineering team to get the Adobe AIR for Linux runtime and SDK alphas out the door. At long last, just a couple hours ago, we pushed the alphas onto our Adobe Labs website where developers can download and begin exploring this early technology. Though not feature complete, most of the features are working. The release notes provide additional details on what features are enabled, which are not, and known issues. There are still many bugs to fix at this point (it is an alpha), but we're releasing this to the public to get feedback from the community . We've also provided sample applications with source code to help people get started.

This announcement is exciting for many reasons including:

• A Flash developer, who built an AIR-based desktop application that originally targeted Mac or Windows, will likely be surprised to learn that the application now runs on Linux even though they probably never considered building a Linux-based application to begin with. This is core to the "write once, run everywhere" philosophy of Adobe AIR.
• An Ajax developer can now use a framework like YUI, Dojo, Ext, or MooTools to build Linux-based desktop applications.
• The barrier to entry is fairly minimal at this point. the AIR runtime and SDK are both free. The Flex framework is now open source. Flex Builder for Linux is currently free for download and can be used to build AIR applications, but a developer could use their favorite Linux IDE -- whether its Eclipse-based or vi/emacs.

In addition, today Adobe was also welcomed by the Linux Foundation, a nonprofit consortium dedicated to fostering the growth of Linux, as its newest member today which is also very exciting.

Long live Tux! Image courtesy of Ryan Stewart.