AIR will stay proprietary, it seems [LWN.net]

AIR will stay proprietary, it seems

Posted Feb 29, 2008 8:01 UTC (Fri) by coriordan (guest, #7544)
Parent article: Adobe to deliver AIR for Linux (eWeek)

He really dances around the issue, but he seems to say that their AIR for GNU/Linux will be
proprietary software.  He mentions "free", but there's no indication he uses the word to talk
about giving rights to the users.

Rather than a contribution, this would be a temptation for GNU/Linux users to accept non-free
software.

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AIR will stay proprietary, it seems

Posted Feb 29, 2008 15:24 UTC (Fri) by AJWM (subscriber, #15888) [Link]

Indeed.

If they really wanted to "make nice with the open source community" they'd release the source
to AIR and it would get ported to the Linux platform in short order.  Instead they're
developing a (presumably, x86-only) Linux (what, no BSD?) version in-house.

Personally I prefer free air ;-)

AIR will stay proprietary, it seems

Posted Mar 1, 2008 14:46 UTC (Sat) by muwlgr (guest, #35359) [Link]

Vendor lock-in, is what all Adobe moves are done for.
Until Flash specifications are opened, it is not worth wasting our attention to it.

AIR will stay proprietary, it seems

Posted Mar 5, 2008 0:56 UTC (Wed) by sandmann (subscriber, #473) [Link]

Yes, there is an urgent need for a credible, free competitor to AIR. AIR has the potential to
become one of the standard ways applications are delivered, and we should try hard to prevent
that from happening.

The competitor could be a compatible replacement or a completely new system, but a completely
new system would be preferable because it wouldn't allow Adobe to control an important
standard.