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It's the logical thing for Adobe to do. Jobs is complaining about the proprietary platform, performance issues and all that. Now it time to turn it around.

Adobe will still sell all their tools, they'll still have legions of flash programmers, they'll run on every mobile device except the iPhone.

What's so important about keeping the flash engine closed source?

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I agree completely and they're halfway there so it makes plenty of sense to take the last step - there are already open source and commercial alternative IDEs like FlashDevelop and FDT.

Open sourcing the flashplayer will rapidly make them a standard on every platform instead of being a defacto standard on Windows and generally poor results outside of it.

Open sourcing the FLA format can only help developers ... every new version of Flash devs everywhere pray that this time Adobe'll do nothing more than just fix everything and the threat of someone else doing that for us that might be the motivation Adobe needs to do it themselves.

Open sourcing Flash would definitely be in Adobe's best interests. The only possible thing holding them back is shoddy coding practices (using security-through-obscurity) which would result in more exploits and the Flash player gaining an even worse reputation.

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