Another benefit, is inclusion into the Linux distribution. If you want AIR work out of the box on Linux, open-source is the only way. Binary only will only be available as unofficial installation and not very well integrated into the distribution (for most of them). And that, I think it must be a major argument for Adobe.

@Everyone Who Cares: When I mentioned Linux is coming to AIR at a PHP-based conference recently people got pretty excited. I know this is a great step and a right step.

You’re right of course. But I’m sure cross-platform consistency is just as important to Sun, and it still released the code to Java. That’s also the situation with Mozilla: even though the source code is available, the overwhelming majority still use the official Mozilla builds, and only a very small minority actually change the code and build their own version. Those that do probably do it for things like debugging HTML or extensions, profiling, and fixing bugs – changes that can be merged back upstream. You simply don’t see anyone offering their own modified Firefox version, because consistency is important to the users as well.

Likewise with AIR, I’m sure that almost everyone will choose to use Adobe’s official builds on all the supported platforms. The very few that don’t will probably do so for a good reason and will know they’re responsible if their client doesn’t work. The much bigger change is that AIR might be available on platforms Adobe did not intend to support, and while the port may not be perfect I think it’s still better overall than not having it available on those platforms at all.

I’m not saying open-sourcing AIR is essential, AIR is useful with or without the source code, it’s just a little more useful with it.

Uri