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Air took a baby step onto a platform that isn't Windows or Macintosh with the rollout of its Adobe AIR for Linux Alpha release. "This prerelease of Adobe AIR for Linux is alpha-quality and is not feature complete," the company cautioned in its announcement.

Current AIR apps that perform well on the two mainstream operating systems may not perform as well on Linux. That's due to the missing features as listed in the release notes.

The company also provided an update to Adobe Flex Builder to support application development with Air. Open source fans should note Adobe released both the Flex framework and the BlazeDS messaging technology under various open source licenses recently.

Flash Player 9, available on Linux, is not open source, though the Tamarin virtual machine supported by Adobe and hosted by the Mozilla Foundation (Happy 10th birthday to Mozilla!) is; Tamarin forms the core of Flash Player, as Adobe noted in a statement.

Adobe's run-up and embracing of Linux and open source took some time, to put it delicately. The company seems to have found a model that opens it to more developers while protecting its valuable revenue stream; perhaps open source projects will bring even more developers to the Adobe banner.