Adobe Systems is to join the Linux Foundation, a non-profit organisation dedicated to fostering growth of the open source operating system.

The Foundation was created last year as a result of a merger between the Open Source Development Labs and the Free Standards Group. 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, executive director at 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, including HTML, Ajax, Adobe Flash and Adobe Flex, without the need for extra platform code.

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

The final product is expected to arrive later this year and will feature multiple language support, according to Adobe.