Rest assured — we’re working on Adobe AIR for Linux! :) In fact, we’re downright enthusiastic about supporting Linux. In our developer FAQ that’s been publicly available for at least the past ten months, we’ve been clear that the Linux version would come out after the Mac and Windows versions. Ultimately, our goal is to release the Mac, Windows and Linux versions at the same time. However, for our first version, we need anticipated awhile back needing some extra time to make sure we nail it.

Today, Kevin Lynch, our CTO at Adobe, publicly demonstrated an AIR application running on Linux and I’d encourage you to check it out.

Here’s a link to the YouTube video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bq5lb7p_YfQ&eurl=http://www.mikechambers.com/blog/2008/02/25/video-adobe-air-running-on-linux/

We’ll be rolling out a public alpha soon that everyone can download and experiment with.

Cheers,

-Rob

Sr. Product Manager, Adobe AIR

http://www.adobe.com/go/air/

The badge install will auto-upgrade (preserving the old runtime it seems) to 1.0…

Try it out now, http://about.stompernet.com/scrutinizer, with our Scrutinizer Browser — a simulation of human vision inside a browser for design inspection and usability testing. Caveat: Registration required to download.

I’m sure other apps will be updated shortly.

“The Linux® release of Adobe AIR is under development, but Adobe does not provide specific information about future releases.”

Previously, there were claims that there would be Linux support post-1.0 release. So now the clock starts, I guess.

But I suspect that Linux users will be subjected to the same “awesome” support Adobe has traditionally provided for the Linux version of Flash, which has been less than stellar as it always seemed like it was a major version behind (until sometime around the midlife of v9).

There are two ways to “support” open source. The first is actually release code that is licensed with an open source license. The other is to release your software for open source operating systems. The best would be to do both with the same software.