Adobe AIR Development Ended on Desktop Linux 1
Adobe has decided to stop development for their fairly new Adobe-AIR platform on desktop Linux. For some reason, they will continue development on Android. Huh? Doesn’t Adobe know that Android is Linux?
AIR on 64-bit Linux Sucked
I tried AdobeAIR on a 64-bit Linux desktop about a yr ago to try a stock tracking app. It was slow and heavy so I removed it. Where I work, we dislike proprietary solutions that force vendor lock-in. AIR will not be installed on any of our machines regardless of OS and we advise our clients of the issues with AIR and all proprietary tools. The same applies to Silverlight. We won’t install it here and recommend that our clients do not as well. I would remove Flash if there wouldn’t be a revolt and I’ve already removed Adobe Acrobat from all our systems. We use alternatives with better security (or just fewer attackers). Adobe management doesn’t seem to understand how to build software that can be secure. They certainly haven’t shown a desire to do this based on the number of unfixed zero day exploits published continuously.
Our clients are tired of being trapped by proprietary, costly, vendor solutions when it isn’t necessary. There are lots of alternatives. Some clients have requested that we find a way to replace Windows with Linux. That’s tougher than it sounds in some markets, but there are workable options for most needs that will reduce the amount of MS-Windows in an environment significantly.
Open Standards Mandated Going Forward
Going forward, we and many other companies will be deploying solutions that support open standards, not proprietary, walled-off, gardens. Adobe needs to embrace these standards to survive and start producing tools in support of these open solutions. Sorry Adobe, you created/bought many great tools, but Adobe proprietary tools are becoming more and more irrelevant.
HTML5 is the great hope for open solutions. Hopefully, it won’t become like Java, which has proven to be a huge liability for anyone that has it installed. Our internal security people, CISSP certified, refuse to install Java on their primary machines over security concerns. I can’t blame them.
Yep. Clean, lean, open and transparent — what you would expect on Linux — is probably the opposite of what Adobe stands for.