Yesterday the news came out that Apple had hired Kevin Lynch away from Adobe, where he served as CTO. The hire hasn’t been without controversy.

Over on Daring Fireball, John Gruber reacted to the news with contempt and disbelief, pointing out that while at Adobe, Lynch had displayed questionable judgement in his championing of Flash at the expense of Apple and iOS:

Lynch wasn’t just an employee pushing the company line. As CTO, he was the guy who defined the company line — and his line had Adobe still pushing for Flash on mobile devices over three years after the iPhone shipped.

Gruber concludes that Lynch is a “bozo.” He makes a strong case for pinning the label on lynch, but he fails to consider alternative explanations for the hire.

On Apple Insider, Daniel Eran Dilger has a different take on the hire. He points out that Lynch has a long and successful track record with digital media creation tools. He came to Adobe when they hired Macromedia, where he was their top technical and product exec. He was instrumental in the creation of Dreamweaver, and the Mac version of FrameMaker.

It is also worth noting that despite the fact that while the success of the iPhone and iOS caught Adobe, not to mention the rest of the tech-industry, flat-footed, Flash had a damn good run up until that point, and since then, Adobe has done a reasonable job establishing itself on iOS with end-user-apps, and tools for content creators, even without Flash.

I’ll suggest an alternative take: Apple hired Lynch as part of an ongoing effort to improve their tools for creating content and apps for iOS devices. Time will tell whether or not he was a good hire. Certainly other tech execs have fallen from grace, only to redeem themselves. Take Google’s Eric Schmidt, who had a great run at Google after getting beaten badly by Microsoft while leading Novell, or Steve Jobs, who was run out of Apple by a guy he himself hired and had a middling run with NeXT before returning to Apple and leading it to its current preeminence.