[schultzor]

Does the openness of the spec even matter when effectively only one party can write and ship a usable plugin for it?

[beej71]

I think so. It's important because people theoretically can write plugins for it.

Writing a Flash player is a lot of work, and there's not much reason to do so if Adobe has most computers covered already.

[drivebyacct2]

Gnash, swfdec, lightspark, scaleform, smokescreen and others that I'm forgetting are making progress. Most of them are highly compatible with the simple image and video use cases that dominate well over 95% (at least of my) use of flash.

[protomyth]

A third-party cannot ship a flash plugin that supports Hulu. Not working 5% of the time causes nasty support issues.