Adobe Systems has climbed into bed with the open source developer community by joining the Linux Foundation.

The software firm also announced today that it has released a pre-release alpha version of its Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) for rich web apps on Linux.

"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," Jim Zemlin, executive director at the Linux Foundation, said in a statement.

Kevin Lynch, Adobe's CTO, has, hot on the heels of Microsoft’s interoperability announcement earlier this year, been talking up plans to contribute more to open source and standards.

Adobe, which last week launched a free version of Photoshop online, has already open sourced its software development kit for the Flex development framework and BlazeDS.

It also contributes to the open source Tamarin virtual machine, hosted by the Mozilla Foundation, which is the core of Adobe Flash Player.

The company said, by joining the Linux Foundation, it hoped to bolster the use of rich internet apps on the Linux platform. However, Adobe still has a long way to go in convincing open source fanciers. The likes of Photoshop and other core Adobe products still carry an expensive price tag.

Just last month, the San Jose-based firm threw its weight behind the SQLite database project, joining a new consortium alongside Mozilla and Symbian in an agreement to sponsor the embedded SQL database engine with core source code in the public domain.

But there's no announcement yet from Adobe that it plans to cough up source code to software developers keen to lift the skirt of AIR. ®

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