It buys them relevance in the face of Microsoft. Flash may be on nearly every browser, but Silverlight is only one Windows Update away from similar numbers. Adobe watched the .NET CLR rapidly eat Java's pie, and now the same technology is targeting Flash.
To be competitive with .NET, Flash needs at least as good a developer community, which means it needs to be at least as open as the CLR (which is an open standard, various patents notwithstanding). The sad thing is that a third-party developer community has tried to grow up around Flash for a decade now, but until recently Adobe has done little to encourage it, simply to protect Flash sales and outrageous Flex server licensing fees.
To be competitive with .NET, Flash needs at least as good a developer community, which means it needs to be at least as open as the CLR (which is an open standard, various patents notwithstanding). The sad thing is that a third-party developer community has tried to grow up around Flash for a decade now, but until recently Adobe has done little to encourage it, simply to protect Flash sales and outrageous Flex server licensing fees.