[archgrove]

The author openly conceeds the points that consumers will actually care about - performance, security, and proprietary nature. It's hard to claim that it's a "marketing trick to pull the wool over the eyes of consumers" when you agree with large tracts of the author's argument.

Their main point, that he's somehow a hypocrite because Apple haven't used the latest tech for everything, entirely misses the point he's making - Putting a 3rd party layer between your platform and developers can cause a lag in new features being used. He then states he's mostly worried that Adobe would have really amplified this lag, as "Adobe has been painfully slow to adopt enhancements to Apple’s platforms". He doesn't say it's bad that they've been this slow, just that they are this slow. If it takes them 10 years to adopt Cocoa, why would anything in iPhone 4.0 turn up in Flash till 2015? His claim is that middleware lag is a bad thing is not weakened by iTunes for Windows being crappy - if anything, it's strengthened.

He makes his position very clear - "we sell more devices because we have the best apps", and feels they get the best apps without middleware. There's nothing inconsistent with this position, whilst still taking advantage of other platforms lack of restrictions. I'm not even going to deal with the authors claim that h.264 is as proprietary as Flash: A standard that was developed by a committee, in the open, with many implementations and a licensing scheme for anyone, versus a commercial closed product developed by a single company and no competitive implementations? Sure, there's no difference at all there.

[nkassis]

I think he mostly argues about the fact that Jobs stated Flash not being and open standard as a reason not to support it. I hope we can all agree that Apple has never really been an open standards company and as the author points out, they've mostly stated this for marketing purposes while not fully embracing the idea.

[rimantas]

  I hope we can all agree that Apple has never really been
  an open standards company

We cannot. I strongly disagree. At least in the web space there is a lot of innovation comming from or strongly supported by Apple.

[nkassis]

Not claiming they have never done anything for the community but they have far more closed projects than open ones.

[rimantas]

It's complicate. I believe each and every of their closed project depends a lot on a number of open ones—just take a look at Settings->About->Legal on iPhone or take a look at http://www.apple.com/opensource/. On the other hand they do not contribute to all of OSS they use. But http://www.opensource.apple.com/ is still impressive.

[jarek]

... like Theora, and unlike H.264.

[binspace]

They are open just like Microsoft :-)

[Terretta]

> I hope we can all agree that Apple has never really been an open standards company

Show me this for Flash:

http://trac.webkit.org/

Or this:

http://www.opensource.apple.com/release/mac-os-x-1063/

And check out paragraph 2:

http://webkit.org/projects/goals.html

Fire up Chrome to check out how many re-implementations of WebKit are out there based on this open source and open standards base.

[ryoshu]

> Show me this for Flash

http://www.adobe.com/devnet/swf/

> Or this:

http://opensource.adobe.com/wiki/display/site/Home

> And check out paragraph 2:

http://www.openscreenproject.org/partners/current_partners.h...

[Terretta]

1. You didn't show the same thing for Flash. SWF spec in a PDF is not the same as the open source code hub for the web rendering engine used by Google, RIM, etc.

2. You didn't show the same thing for open source. OS X is arguably the family jewels. The equivalent for Adobe would be CS 5, not Tamarin or a Flex SDK.

3. You didn't show the same thing for the open source goals. That press release blurb and list of "partners" like Atlantic Records, Paramount and Lionsgate does not correlate to the paragraph promising to give WebKit back with BSD and LGPL style licensing, and listing corporate "industry leaders" sponsors is not the same as running a public chatroom and IRC channel for webkit.