And that's the point, flash has some real drawbacks and since it's not an open standard with multiple implementations, it stagnated while Adobe thought it had no competition.
That's a fair point. I think that's more or less how Google approaches it even though they are not fans of closed web formats.
I do think there is a world of difference between a big complex closed platform exclusively available from Adobe and H.264 which has a variety of encoders/decoders available from multiple license holders. I seem to recall in the past Adobe has licensed in Flash to Nokia in almost the same way. Nokia ported & optimized the code for some of their handsets (N900 and others) It would be interesting to know if Adobe offered a similar arrangement to Apple. That would completely debunk everything Apple has been saying if they had the flexibility to control the Flash implementation on the iPhone themselves.
Flash isn't an open standard by any useful definition.
Sure they specified the container format and data structures (just like with the MS Office formats), but everybody had figured that part out a long time ago because it's obvious and easy to capitalize on by developing an extractor. The runtime APIs are incredibly hard to reverse-engineer, comprise the vast bulk of the Flash implementation, and are the entire reason for the plugin's instability.
Actually, it is based on a draft h.263, not the final h.263.
One of the older flash specification did document it. The svq3 specification was removed from swf specs around time it was made available under more liberal license (Sorenson probably didn't agree with wider specs availability).
