After Ted posted his AIR entry on his blog and talked about the various great things about the runtime, he also mentioned that it is important to purchase a signed certificate from companies such as Thawte in order to get the “greatly expanded APIs”, I immediately pinged Ryan to confirm this since Ted was not immediately available.

Shocked, Ryan went to check and reported back that it was not the case. Since then, I noticed that the misinformation has been removed from Ted’s blog.

The actual question I posed to Ryan was if he thought the $300 certificate cost from Thawte would discourage the development of open source and free applications. He didn’t think so due to the ability to self-sign your own applications, however, at the cost of them being labeled as “UNVERIFIED” when the user installs them. Is there a way around this? Such as a certificate for open source applications to encourage this ever-increasingly popular movement?