Adobe announced today that Adobe AIR for Linux has left Adobe Labs and is now offered for download alongside AIR for Windows and OS X.  You can read more about the release over at Ars Technica, if you are interested. The interesting question to me is: how does this change the Adobe AIR vs. Appcelerator Titanium landscape.

For anyone who does not know, Appcelerator Titanium is an open-source alternative to Adobe AIR. Unfortunately, the Linux client has not yet been released. This is AIR’s biggest advantage – it is already out for all platforms. Titanium, on the other hand, will still be a while longer.

To counter this, though, is Titanium’s open platform. Having an application be closed-source is one thing, having all your applications run on closed-source software is a different thing. If Adobe decides not to support Linux any more, Linux doesn’t get AIR. With Titanium, though, the community could just pick up the code and keep going.

Overall, it wll probably come down to implementation and timing. Right now, Titanium is a bit behind, but they certainly have a chance to chatch up, especially since AIR still crashes my browser when I try to download AIR applications.

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