Adobe vs. Apple Lawsuit Coming

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IT World is reporting that their sources within Adobe are saying that Adobe is preparing a lawsuit against Apple for their anti-competitive actions regarding Flash, and more offensive, their blocking of cross-compilers with the new iPhone OS 4. While Adobe hasn’t announced anything publicly, they’re very upset over Apple’s recent actions (does a company with over 6,000 employees have emotions?) and we should expect to see a lawsuit between the two soon.

A lot of people are aware of Apple’s decision to block Flash on the iPad, but a recent change in the iPhone OS 4 licensing agreement requires all iPhone apps to be written natively in Objective-C. This is a shot in the kneecaps to Adobe’s Packager for iPhone function in Flash Professional CS5 (which just came out yesterday) which would of allowed developers to write their applications in ActionScript 3 (the language behind Flash), and then either compile their application as a Flash app or as a standalone iPhone app.

Obviously, Apple wasn’t keen on that as they legally prohibited that. The new licensing agreement also blocks developers from writing applications in C# with the hopes of cross-compiling into a Silverlight application or a iPhone app.

Adobe’s Lee Brimelow, their Flash evangelist, gave a very passionate blog posting regarding Apple’s anti-competitive actions, in which he accused Apple of trying to literally kill Adobe. Steve Jobs once again played the “performance card” for the reason behind the new agreement. Like the reason for Flash being blocked, Jobs said that apps produced with a cross-compiler were “sub-standard”.

Adobe’s official position has been that they’re looking into the legality of the new iPhone OS 4 agreement. If IT World’s sources in Adobe are to believed. We should expect to see an Apple-Adobe lawsuit soon. And in the world of their writer, “It’s not going to be pretty.”