Why is it paid to develop on Linux with the AIR SDK and not just publish?

[Fancy2209]

Hello, I've recently switched to linux and cannot yet buy a AIR License, which puts me in a tricky situation.
I'm perfectly fine on only exporting to Windows and macOS until I can get a license to target Linux, but I find it annoying that I cannot compile and test apps using mxmlc's and ADL's native binaries and have to use Java and the AIR SDK on wine until I can get a license.

It's understandable, but I am just very curious why it was decided that the license would also be needed to develop on linux and not just export with ADT.

[ajwfrost]

We'd put the "commercial license required" check into the Linux runtime, just to try to help recover some of the investment we'd made in bringing back the Linux variant. But we had also had a discussion recently about the options and differences between development activities (running via ADL) vs packaging up an app for distribution (via ADT). It's a bit of a balance we're finding, because whilst we want to encourage people to use AIR SDK, we also need to ensure it's commercially viable. There's a high proportion of "free tier" usage so we're going to be looking at ways to encourage people onto the commercial tiers - primarily by adding value via new features or platforms.

Ideas are welcomed of course, and the discussion is still going on.. maybe we could do something such as allowing ADL-based apps to launch - but with a time limit or similar (otherwise people would just distribute their apps with a renamed ADL..)

Appreciate the inputs :-) thanks!

[Fancy2209]

A time limit could work
Maybe there could also be a free license of sorts, that can only be active on a certain number of machines (2/3) per license could work

[chatmurai]

Well, while I totally understand that Harman has to recover some of the investment they made, I thing that ADL isn't ADT and I would be happy to be able to test a project on Linux using ADL, and not to be stuck like I am currently.

[punkice3407]

I completely agree. As a developer, not being able to test in the environment you work in is frustrating

[B-Interactive]

As another example, in the past I had purchased a license and for a time was a package maintainer for the AIR SDK under a Linux distribution. My work shifted and my license lapsed, but I was still interested in supporting the AIR ecosystem as my work may some day call upon it again.

As I no longer had any way of testing the SDK under Linux though, I withdraw from providing package maintenance support.

That's the tricky thing about Linux. The community depends almost entirely on volunteers and I would suggest it's in Harman's own interest, to make those efforts easier. My freely given efforts were towards supporting the AIR for Linux community, which helps support AIR, which helps support Harman. The licensing got in the way of that though.

[dmunsie]

How much does it cost to be able to target Linux?

[ajwfrost]

Currently it just needs any commercial license in order to run ADT or the AIR runtime, so $199/year for basic tier or $1199/year if your company has reasonable revenue

Plan for AIR v52 is that ADT will still need a commercial license (for packaging applications etc) but ADL would be allowed for anyone for basic usage or evaluation. But, if you don't have a commercial license, then the runtime binaries will be time-bound to a year after their build, in order to avoid them being used with ADL as a longer-term/distributed mechanism.

Hopefully that's a suitable compromise..

For interest, I just checked the ADT usage stats for March, and 5% of calls to ADT were from Linux machines. So it's relatively small, but not insignificant..

thanks