Adobe will allegedly sue Apple over their efforts to keep Flash off the iPhone and iPad, a blogger at ITWorld wrote this week.

Citing "sources close to Adobe," Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols said a lawsuit would come within a few weeks.

Vaughan-Nichols wrote about the subject twice this week in his "Sure, It's Secure!" blog on the site.

In the first post, Vaughan-Nichols offered no indication of who specifically told him Adobe would sue Apple, while cautioning that Adobe hasn't made any public indications that it intends to sue.

He also pointed to the blog of Lee Brimelow, an Adobe platform evangelist, who last week was so incensed by the license agreement for the iPhone 4.0 Software Developer's Kit that he wrote "Go screw yourself Apple."

The changes to license agreement effectively lock out apps written in cross-compilers, including the Flash compiler that is part of Adobe Creative Suite 5.

The day the iPad was launched, an Adobe developer demonstrated a Reversi app written once for the Adobe AIR platform, that ran on Mac OS X, Windows, Linux, iPhone and iPad without changes to the code. That capability was permitted under previous versions of the iPhone OS SDK, and became prohibited only recently with the release of the iPhone OS 4.0 SDK.

"Unless things change drastically between Apple and Adobe in the next few weeks, from what I'm hearing you can expect to see Adobe taking Apple to court over the issue," Vaughan-Nichols wrote. "It's not going to be pretty."

Later, Vaughan-Nichols made another blog post saying he had an idea how Adobe might sue Apple.

Thomas Carey, chairman of the business practice group at Sunstein, a technology and intellectual property law firm, told Vaughan-Nichols that "Adobe could sue on antitrust grounds." Carey said Adobe could argue that Apple irrationally used market power to lock Adobe out as a competitor for app sales.