And here we go again.
Just a month after announcing that
there won't be an official AIR runtime for Linux,
Adobe drops Molehill support for the Linux Flash Player too. This is even worst, since this being part of the player itself I doubt Linux distros would have a chance to do it themselves.
It's really so disheartening.
We are exactly back to the days of Flash Player 8 when Adobe simply didn't provide a player for Linux (jumped from 7 to 9). We are back to the days where Linux was a second class citizen. We are back to the days where it's not possible to be a Flash developer on Linux. They don't even post it on the
official Flash Player and AIR blog,
the Linux blog or
the Open Source blog. Only
one message on the forums and
a twit from
Thibault Imbert.
I'm sure this is a business decision but I don't know what the fuck Adobe is about these days any more. They were putting so much effort into becoming a "serious" platform, ready for the enterprise and take it on the big boys. They developed the language from the joke AVM1 + AS2 was to a fairly decent AVM2 + AS3. Bring on the Java-based command line compiler and tools. They promised Linux releases at the same time that Mac and Windows releases. They also promised time and time again that AIR was the real deal when it came down to cross-platform development, Adobe was going to do the hard word of abstracting all those platform specific APIs so we would only need to worry about our app's features.
Now where is all that? Was it all just marketing bullshit? As soon as the things got real (hardware acceleration and advanced features), bye-bye Linux. To me they are looking like either:
a) naive and over confident thinking that they could pull it off
b) a headless chicken one day saying A, the next day doing B
c) liars
Choose what you want.