Making Headlines

Adobe Systems is scheduled to join the Linux Foundation, according to sources in the industry which are reporting the story this week.

The foundation is non-profit group dedicated to fostering growth of the open source operating system within the programming community.

The group was created last year as a result of a merger between the Open Source Development Labs and the Free Standards Group.

Current members include HP, IBM, Google and Nokia.

"Adobe's decision to join the Linux Foundation is a natural extension of its commitment to open standards and open source, which demonstrates its leadership and foresight in the software industry," said Jim Zemlin, the executive director of the Linux Foundation.

"Adobe's membership will contribute to our goal of even more application development on Linux with a specific emphasis on web 2.0 applications."

The announcement was designed to coincide with the release of an alpha version of Adobe's Air for rich web applications on Linux.

Air for Linux allows developers to build rich Internet applications for the Linux platform that work with popular web technologies.

Those technologies include HTML, Ajax, Adobe Flash and Adobe Flex, without the need for extra platform code.

The alpha release of Air currently works only with Sun Java, although Adobe is promising compatibility with GNU Java in the final version.

Final products are expected to arrive later in 2008 and plan to feature multiple language support, according to a statement from Adobe.