I attended OSCON and because we’ve open sourced Flex, that was the focus for most of the conversations. But I also talked to people about Adobe AIR and a lot of them seemed surprised at just how closely Adobe AIR is tied to open source. The runtime itself isn’t open source, but we’re making use of a lot of open source projects and contributing to some of those projects:

• • -Tamarin - this is the virtual machine in the Flash Player that we open sourced under the Mozilla tri license.
  • -Webkit - We’re using Webkit as our HTML renderer in Adobe AIR and we’re hoping to contribute back to the project as we fix and implement things.
  • -Flex - While not technically a part of Adobe AIR, it’s one of the ways to build AIR applications and like Ajax, it’s an open source technology.

Adobe AIR is all about appealing to web developers. AIR is intended to let you take your web development skills and build engaging desktop experiences. If you want to do that using as many open source, standards-based technologies as possible, Adobe AIR fills the need with Webkit and our HTML/Ajax stack. We’re always looking for open source feedback, so feel free to leave a comment or drop me an email.