[snom370]

As I said, it remains to be seen how open it will actually be. But at least all of these standards are either completely open or available for licensing, so unless they have added some "secret sauce" on top (for instance that iPhones will only ever talk to other iPhones through Apples discovery service) then it's a good starting point.

AFAIK, H.264 is an open standard. That it's patented and not royalty free doesn't make it closed, it simply makes it non-free. Another example is the G.729 voice codec, which has lots of open source implementations, but to use it you will have to buy a license. Open source PBX vendors like Digium provide licenses to those that need them. It's not an ideal situation, which is why G.729 is not as popular in the open source world, but it's still better than Skypes proprietary protocol.

[ZeroGravitas]

"Open Standard" means patent royalty free. You'll find plenty of Apple pundits like Gruber who'll dispute this due to Apple getting behind H.264 for web video, but Apple themselves (and standards bodies like MPEG or W3C) don't use the term incorrectly. Apple have sailed pretty close to the wind though, using phrasing like "open and standard technologies" and then including technologies that are standard, but not open standards.

I thought I caught them referring to something that wasn't as an "Open Standard" in the keynote but I've not had time to check, but certainly they've been very careful not to previously. (I think the phrasing might have been "open industry standard").

But in, for example, Thoughts on Flash, the phrase "open standard" is used repeatedly to refer to HTML5, CSS, Javascript etc. and portrayed as a very good quality for these things to have but when H.264 is mentioned it is referred to just as an "industry standard".

http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/

Also Skype, along with Broadcom and Xiph, are working on a royalty-free voice codec at IETF and have offered their codecs and patents as the basis for that work. For video Skype use VP7 and Google hasn't made any big announcement but it's clear they're positioning VP8 as a Video Chat codec as well as for Web Video within the WebM container. I see Apple's announcement mostly as a half-hearted spoiler for that, kind of like Microsoft's OOXML versus ODF.

[buster]

I guess the meaning of open can have different interpretations . Same difference as in "free speech" and "free beer". Should have clarified that i understand open as in open source, fully open, free to use by everyone for free. Half baked openness is not good enough for internet standards, IMO.