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FSF Response To Steve Jobs's Letter
boilednut writes "Steve Jobs's recent missive on the deficiencies of Adobe's Flash is still reverberating around the Internet. In this editorial, John Sullivan of the Free Software Foundation responds, arguing that Apple is presenting users with a false choice between Adobe's proprietary software and Apple's walled garden."
I'd be more interested in a response from Xiph on Job's email concerning Theora.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Letting the users decide is the best option, what's that? the users can't decide because of apple, of course they can, they aren't forced to buy the product. Their own stupid fault if they buy something so locked down and don't like it.
As far as stallman is concerned, it is still another choice, just one that doesn't make sense from the freedom perspective.
I think that what many people are missing is that what Apple is offering is a proprietary implementation of open standards, vs a proprietary implementation of a closed standard. If Apple finds a problem in Safari, it can fix it. If it finds a problem with Flash, it can't. An iPhone owner who doesn't like Apple's implementations of HTML5 or IMAP can get a different smart phone. If he doesn't like Adobe's implementation of Flash, he's hosed.
Yet if the FSF can't put out something mainstream people want to use, this entire argument is worthless. Besides, it's just a cycle. Open - > closed -> open -> closed. Just think pre-web ineternet, compuserve, WWW, and now App Store or Facebook.
People don't see 'free' as good because if it's a bitch to use they're going to ignore it. It's gotten significantly better in the last decade but in general term it's still a PITA to use.
As a rock-in-roll Physicist once said, No matter where you go, there you are.
... Let the market decide? If people value walled gardens over open source or vice versatile, then let users vote with their dollars ornEuros or whatever?
I mean, really. The free software guys care about something that is irrelevant to most of Apple's customers, and vice-versa. What's the point?
If Mr. Sullivan needs [the fact that Jobs doesn't talk about the general problem with proprietary technology] explained to him then maybe he should hold his comments until he understands it. Does he actually expect *every* article, blog post or story to rehash this basic concept?
I think it's reasonable to expect an editorial that complains that Flash is "not open" as its first big bold bullet point would somehow address the reason why Jobs thinks we should care. I know why I care, but it's not at all clear why Jobs thinks I should care.
If you had read the next paragraph as well, you would probably have held your idiotic comment as well:
Jobs doesn't say why open standards are good, because then it would be obvious that that the "freedom" Jobs offers just isn't.
I RTFA, and I think it's the most well-thought-out criticism of Jobs' anti-Flash editorial I've seen so far The author maintains "the way out of the Adobe vs. Apple cage match is straightforward, and exists already: free software operating systems like GNU/Linux with free software Web browsers, supporting free media formats like Ogg Theora" and later concludes, "So, the correct decision in the dispute between Apple and Adobe is "none of the above." The past we need to leave behind is not just Flash, it's Apple's proprietary software as well." I agree with that in principle. I guess where I get stuck is, I do like OS/X. I like it a lot better than Linux. I'm not involved in cutting video but I work with someone who is, and they tell me they like H.264 a lot better than Ogg Theora. So...am I part of the problem? Is the Free Software movement not up to the task of competing with proprietary software? I feel like the trade-off I'm currently making with OS/X is acceptable -- for now. I don't see myself buying an iPhone (or iPad) anytime soon, but neither do I see myself getting rid of my iMac.
Where there is the necessary technical skill to move mountains, there is no need for the faith that moves mountains.
He doesnt care that you should care, or not.
Flash apps circumvent the app store, you can make a website app through flash for free (such as a game) and Jobs doesn't get to enforce his Apple Tax.
He's implying that no-one should access the web with a closed OS under any circumstance. That seems ridiculous. There are many items that may benefit from web-access that don't need full/open access. I think right now people are arguing over whether or not a phone is such an item. Personally, I don't want root access to my phone. I'm happy to give up full freedom on my phone in exchange for it NEVER failing to do what I need it to do.
This is pretty typical for a confidence man or a salesman - he doesn't ask "do you want my product or not" but rather, "do you want the green one, or the blue one?" The trick is accepting the false premise in the first place. As soon as you try to follow the red queen as it jumps around from left, right, and center, the con man has you.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Apple is presenting users with a false choice between Adobe's proprietary software and Apple's walled garden.
It is a real choice, but there are obviously more options to chose from than the enumerated two.
Don't hold back. Tell us how you really feel! :)
Say what you want about Jobs, but one thing is clear: he's a businessman first and foremost. He knows how to make money. Regardless of what he may say about Flash, the decision to keep it off certain Apple products is a business decision that is aimed at making Apple more profitable.
The FSF isn't hijacking it. It is correctly framing the discussion. HTML5 isn't going to do anything to replace the bulk of Flash web content out there. Most of that is already replaced with "apps".
That's the single most annoying thing about the iPhone/iPad. It takes a common protocol and a common interface that works the same across multiple diverse operating systems and takes us back to the 80s and 90s where every little thing like Google Maps would be a seperate single-platform-only probably windos-only proprietary application.
HTML5 is infact just a red herring.
HTML5 isn't going to replace Flash. Proprietary Apple apps are. Proprietary Apple apps already do.
I can choose between a platform that's more closed than a Nintendo and proprietary apps to match, or another proprietary standard that at least lets me pick the OS of my choice.
Jobs is all about the vendorlock. His populist rantings are just a smokescreen.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
For example:
A free Web needs free software. You cannot have a free Web if your access to the software you use to engage the Web is limited to an arbitrary number of computers, or if you are not allowed to conduct business on the Web using the software, or if you are forbidden from asking someone to develop additional features you need.
The web is a separate entity to the client software that accesses it. If somebody accesses the "free web" with a proprietary client, that doesn't make the web any less free or open. The "free web" is dependent on open standards, not the open source nature of browsers. As long as open source browsers exist, I don't see what the FSF's problem is, users still have a choice.
... and then they built the supercollider.
Mr Jalopy posted a note on doing a search & replace of Adobe w/Apple and Flash w/closed. It reads rather well. Probably NOT what Steveo intended but if the turtleneck fits...
Steve Job's isn't a tech visionary, he's a *salesman*! That's all you need to know.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
apple should drop that $99y just to come free apps other phone systems do not have this level of lock in.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
So google maps is more than just a HTML + Java Script web application that requires no proprietary software to run?
apple needs to drop the App Store censorship too!!
That is likely why no flash.
No, me neither. Wozniak, maybe. Jobs, no. But you make an excellent point, thank you.
Where there is the necessary technical skill to move mountains, there is no need for the faith that moves mountains.
Steve Jobs told the world Apple's strategy and it's pretty darn unambiguous. No amount of bitching or pointing out holes in his letter will change that. Accept it and move on.
In the end the user wants to play his Facebook games and Apple says 'you can't on My iPhone or iPad' and they say 'okay' and play on their computer instead.
Do they ditch the iPhone or iPad? Nope..... They go buy another one!
When the general public actually decides to grow a pair things will change.
I wouldn't necessarily put it that way.
I paid $199 for my iPhone and I can't play Facebook games? Well, I guess that's just the way it is. At least until my best buddy starts doing it with his Android/WebOS/Symbian phone. When I see someone in my peer group doing that, that's when I'll say, "Wow! I know what my next phone is going to be!"
Kind of like the Mac and Windows--you'll see one person switch and show off what they can do. That'll inspire someone else. That'll inspire a few more people. And so on and so on.
Except Jobs isn't offering "freedom". He never really argued that in the essay.
Job's argument was that with open web standards, if he/Apple/or_it's_customers are unhappy with the browsing experience, Apple can throw money at it and make a better browser. But if they hate flash on the iPhone, there is NOTHING apple can do to improve it. In essence, Apple has been selling a seamless user experience. It has never been selling freedom and often times you trade in some freedom for convenience. That is Apple's market and his argument.
I own one of the last generation of PPC notebooks Apple made. It's true, it has a slow 1.67GHz G4 processor. But at it's speed it should offer somewhat decent flash, but nearly all video's are choppy for it. I never got a satisfactory answer. Apple points to Adobe saying they code a crappy implementation. Adobe points to Apple talking about not having accent to libraries they need. All I know is flash is ultra slow.
Frankly, while I think Apple is crummy on things sometimes, I know the Internet is also one giant waambulance too. If Apple wanted a super closed off garden, it's not going to get that with HTML5 anyway. I also think flash sucks, so I'd rather have it die as well.
other phone systems don't have 185,000+ apps either.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Steve Jobs has one reason and one reason only for disallowing Flash on his platforms: If flash could be run in the browser, the entire app market would fall apart--the same useless apps would be available for free on the internet. Apple wouldn't make any more from the app store. Anything else Stevo says about Flash is complete BS and misdirection. /story
There is no choice when it comes to open standards. It's a Web developer's responsibility to build HTML5, it's a platform vendor's responsibility to include HTML5, it's a browser maker's responsibility to render HTML5, it's a tool-maker's responsibility to make their tools compliant with HTML5. The spec is not optional. Your website also has to use UTF-8 and TCP/IP and ISO MPEG-4.
Consumers use the Web now. Regular people with phones, not tech people with PC's. You can't ask them to patch their system, use an alternate browser, install a plug-in, update a plug-in, or do any kind of I-T work at all. The model is CD/DVD players. A CD put into a CD player has to work. You have to make your CD to Red Book spec, and CD Players have to be to Red Book spec. End of story.
Flash developers do not use the Flash tool to make Flash ... that is an Adobe conceit. They use Flash to make Web apps. In the HTML4 era (1999 through 2007), a Web app was HTML4 plus an embedded plug-in for Mac/PC. The entire Web was Mac/PC, and most users were techies. In the HTML5 era (2007 forward), a Web app is HTML5 on any unknown platform. The users are everybody. That is the reality. There are dozens of HTML5 platforms and only Mac/PC has a Flash plug-in. Adobe's FlashPlayer team is less than 8 people. How are that going to support dozens of platforms? How will the 3-4 updates per year be distributed to what will soon be 10 billion devices? Stop holding your breath.
What has to happen is Adobe has to upgrade their nonstandard, proprietary, closed Web app tool to export HTML5 Web apps. They have to respect the Web app spec just as music tool makers had to respect Red Book. End of story.
It's unbelievable to see FSF support a tool where developers write JavaScript, HTML, CSS, and include ISO MPEG-4 and wrap it up in a closed binary that only proprietary software from one vendor can render. Not to mention, Flash is 14 years old and has had 3 different owners. What if Microsoft buys Adobe (with cash) and screws it up even further, or Apple buys Adobe (with cash) and shuts it down? The Web cannot depend on a single $599 Mac/Windows tool to create and publish audio video. In 5 years, the Web will look like TV. Adobe cannot be the only one who makes VCR's. There is not even a Flash authoring tool for Linux!
Standards are not an issue of choice. See HD-DVD and Blu-Ray DVD which together killed the fucking DVD! No, we are not going to have both standard and nonstandard Web apps. There is only one Web, and it's open, and you can build and publish whatever you want, with any tools, on any platform, as long as you respect the HTML5 spec. Users can use any device, from any manufacturer, to view the Web, as long as that device respects the HTML5 spec. The lack of choice with regards to the spec enables unlimited choice in everything else. See the billion CD/DVD players and exponentially more media and the world enriched by music and movies. Now, we are doing that for the Web with HTML5.
Flash is an incredible CPU hog on my little Mac, it only has 2 CPUs. And Flash is the ONLY THING THAT CAN CRASH MY MAC!!! I just spent an hour last night repairing my HD because of Flash crashing and leaving two craps disconnected from the rest of the file system. If I never saw Flash again I'd be happy.
Keep Doing Good.
Maybe, but after Jobs basically ends Apple with your plan, what then?
Proprietary vendors don't want competition. They especially don't want competition from their own products sold by someone else!
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
> It is a real choice, but there are obviously more options to chose from than the enumerated two.
It's called "false choice" because the limit on the number of choices is artificial. The fact that you actually can choose one of the options is irrelevant. The important part is that you have more than just the choices presented to you and someone is using false rhetoric to distract you from that fact.
So no, it really is a false choice, even though you really can choose one of the options presented to you (as well as other options not shown).
Several Misconceptions H.264 is an open standard in that you are free to implement your own version of it for any platform that you see fit. It is also open in that no one company or group retains total control of the standard. While you may have to pay licensing costs to use any version of H.264, as I said, you are free to implement your own version (there is an open source version called x264). Also, the app store is the best way for Apple users to obtain quality software that is free of errata, defects or security holes at a reasonable cost. Adobe's Flash platform however, has several defects. One such defect is that it uses more battery life than it should on mobile platforms. Our devices are designed to be efficient and have a good battery life. With Flash, the battery life on our devices would be less than optimal. Flash also has several security holes, as is on the Mac and Windows. We do not intend to let a security ridden framework on our devices. I hope this cleared up any misconceptions you may have had.
Sent from my Mac Pro.
they also don't have nazi censorship!
HTML5 isn't going to replace Flash. Proprietary Apple apps are. Proprietary Apple apps already do.
I'm sooo buying Apple stock, you've convinced me.
What Jobs wants is to make the iPhone/iPad a unique experience so that people continue to buy iPhone/iPad. Everyone else wants the iPhone/iPad to be just like every other device thus eliminating the need for an iPhone/iPad.
One is innovation driven by capitalism.
The other is lack of innovation driven by ideology.
I paid $199 for my iPhone and I can't play Facebook games?
That's not a bug, it's a feature.
... and then they built the supercollider.
i understand it's anticompetitive and all that but they seem to let people submit apps(http://developer.apple.com/iphone/index.action) looks like there using java or something how hard would it be for someone to write a plugin wrapper for flash to work? or would they just not let that in the app store? even with a bad contract the volume of people buying that plugin wrapper should cover cost heck adobe could write one and suddenly there getting a quazi royalty from apple customers for something they normally give away could call it the smug tax and just mentioning this because some comments i'm reading are acting like you can only browse early 90's html pages on the i-(whatever we were talking about) without flash there are ways to get a nice looking web page with interactivity without flash and these other methods tend to load faster something important on a hand help computer buy a book on CGI and dynamically produced html pages FFS
You know who else was a *salesman* who kinda saw the trends early?
Henry Ford
In what way is the FSF agenda "self-serving"?
There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.
Jobs doesn't say why open standards are good, because then it would be obvious that that the "freedom" Jobs offers just isn't.
I think I speak for everyone at Slashdot when I say open standards *are* good, for reasons that don't need to be explained.
Apple is not being hypocritical here, Apple's platforms do support all of the open standards of the web. Apple doesn't even offer a proprietary standard for the web, other than quicktime, which they are openly and aggressively working to replace with plugin-less HTML5 video.
If your concern is that they are pushing H.264, then you'd better not run into Adobe's arms, because flash supports it too. I would argue that the video codec discussion is only tangentially related (especially since adobe and apple support the same codec here), and that what's being proposed for HTML5 is the big step forward that we need right now (plus we're limited by mobile, power-efficient hardware decoding -- it sounds to me like we'll have two standards, Google's VP8 for patent freedom, and MPEG LA's H.264 for low power, mobile functionality -- a big improvement overall for the web).
When will it be out?
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Because Microsoft does not make its own hardware...it licenses its software to other vendors. If MS were to release a self contained PC/OS of their own they would be allowed to lock it down as tightly as they wanted.
The FSF isn't hijacking it. It is correctly framing the discussion. HTML5 isn't going to do anything to replace the bulk of Flash web content out there. Most of that is already replaced with "apps".
I swear, you can't make anyone happy here. Where were you when Apple was forcing most applications on the iPhone to be made with HTML (and thus open and thus interpolerable)? I swear, you can't please anybody on slashdot. Your shit if you do, and shit if you don't.
Once you start despising the jerks, you become one.
Google might be different. It has a motive to promote HTML5 to make the Web richer and more addictive.
That's a rather loose interpretation of 'apps' though. I have an iPod Touch and I like it quite a bit. But you scratch your head sometimes at what gets promoted as an 'app' in the 'Store.'
Because it's such a walled garden, there are separate dedicated Radio Player apps for hundreds and hundreds of radio stations. Each has it's own icon on your screen. So each player is counted as a separate App.
And don't get me going about the dozens of 'Sex Position' apps, or the Fart Apps. There's an app now called JaredAllen that is basically a fan page for the guy.
So there are 185,000+ 'apps' but many of them are tiny little nothings. And there are huge gaps in the library that can't be filled because of how the whole operation is structured.
Your argument might make sense if it were not for the fact that you can, in fact, watch YouTube videos in the iPhone os browser :-)
K
More kitchen-sink argumentation? Look, if you had said from the outset that MS are evil incarnate, and even worse -- not friends of open source -- I'd have agreed with you. But your initial point, before bringing in Zune, Xbox, and what have you, was that Microsoft Windows and iPhoneOS are essentially the same in terms of dependence. It's on that point that I strongly disagree. Your other points are more or less true, or at least reasonable, but nobody was disputing them in the first place.
There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.
Wow, ummm your pretty passionate about this.
The developments for HTML5 are still relatively new and I'm going to take a reserved stance on this before claiming its the long awaited solution that we've been looking for.
Unless you have an article or piece of information that I've missed to the contrary? If not I'll stick to my original assumption.
The whole Quake 2 thing i believe was a great proof of concept, but really that's were its all at, proof of concept at this stage not production worthy nor easy and accessible. I'm not sure on one thing though and this is possibly something you'd know but how robust the Application Cache with the iPhone? from what i can gather its still pretty basic. If users are stuck pulling massive amounts of data to get their apps to work (depending upon complexity of course) there is another delimiting factor.
Companies have a right to sell goods and services as they wish, Adwords, Windows, etc is all fine by me. Even Apple has the right to sell "their own services" but the truth is flash does help circumvent the app store and make it easier developers to churn out free apps that can't be controlled.
HTML5 even though is as great concept and I can defiantly see becoming the new buzz word that all next generation smartphones will slap at the top of their specifications lists as an important selling point. I still think its too new.
It could very well be the "app store killer" and solve the issues that android is facing with Vodafone. I'm sure you'd agree the uneven standards that all smartphones are plagued with is a huge growth stunt in that particular part of the industry because nothing is really that portable.
The way i see it, Steve Jobs is just trying to make the easiest, crash free computing experience possible. I don't think Steve Jobs had the average slashdot reader in mind when he came up with the iPad, iPod, or even iPhone. He had joe sixpack and aunt jemima in mind. Coming from a large family, and being one of the few with extensive computer knowledge, i am always called upon to fix viruses, remove spyware, reinstall OSes due to unrecoverable crashes and when i see the iPad, i see a solution to MOST of this. I know my sister with an iPad to do her internet surfing with isn't going to click on some stupid pop up and download a virus, or play some new facebook game and get some crappy software installation required message. And without flash, she isn't going to suffer from computer freezes and crashes. Even if it does get some unrecoverable error, she would just hook it up to her computer, click restore from backup, and a few minutes later she is off to the races. I know the iPad cannot replace all computing tasks, especially with lack of printing support, but for everything most people do, this "closed system" works better and protects them from theirselves. Now it would be nice if they gave advanced users the option to unlock certain restrictions, but it is just not practical. There are plenty of people out there who know just enough about computer to want to unlock protected settings and still end up calling me every weekend to fix it. There are plenty of full tablet PCs out there, and have been for a while. Go get one of those if you cannot stand the restrictions iPhone OS brings. I for one say, boo flash, yay iPhone OS, and go Steve.
But this is what i don't get, a light flash should be okay for now and I think would make everyone think Jobs isn't so full of it. Lets say the flash banners on Slashdot, those shouldn't kill an iPhone and with the way flash now allows you to explore its internals you'd think they could set it up to simply pull meta-data too see if the flash object is worthy or not if so run it with the bare minimum API usage.
But i do like your concept about them having more features than competing SmartPhones, like the ABS breaks and ESP features in cars, they only do it if they must to keep current against their competitors.
No company (including Apple) is obligated or required to design their products to suit the whim, desire, or profit motive of some third party. If Adobe, Xiph, or the FSF doesn't like the way that Apple's products are designed, then they are free to purchase some other company's products or to purchase nothing at all. These simple truths should be obvious to anyone. There's far too many comments from various companies, industry pundits, and posters here that complain about Apple being controlling - because Apple doesn't design their products the way that the commenter wants. Think about this for a moment - who is being controlling here? And just exactly what basis do any of them have for dictating the way that Apple should design their products?
That includes you, the one with your cursor hovering over the reply button.
All of this nonsense sounds very much like a bunch of children complaining that they didn't get to blow the whistle when the train left the station. If you don't like company X's products - don't buy them. Buy something you like better or design a better product yourself. Company X isn't forcing you to do anything no matter how you try to claim they are. Those who wished to supply some piece for Company X's new product but were not invited to are welcome to try selling it to someone else; maybe Company X didn't need or want it, or maybe it's junk and they rejected it for that reason. Whatever the reason, those are the breaks. Nothing any wanna-be supplier can say will make their products or company look better or improve their public image one tiny bit.
And for goodness sakes, try to keep things a bit more civil. Raving doesn't improve the way you're perceived or make your point more valid.
Also ... Not sure if you've seen this ...
http://mashable.com/2010/03/03/flash-nexus-one-demo/
Here something i found also ...
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2010/042210-analyst-html5-far-from-killing.html
Let the blasting begin Mr AC :)
With, or without jailbreaking?
HTML5 is infact just a red herring.
HTML5 isn't going to replace Flash.[...]
I wouldn't bet on that.
One of Adobe's biggest Flash users is YouTube; however, for the last six months or so it's been possible to view YouTube videos using HTML5 if one chooses. Go try it out some time. It's still in beta and there's a few bugs in it but it works and doesn't cause the fan on my laptop to run the entire time like it used to when I was viewing in Flash.
Forget about all the other bullshit about Apple and Steve Jobs and Adobe. Flash is a resource hog, it requires software available from only one source to view and very expensive software to develop. The Web will be better for everybody once it's gone. Well, everybody but Flash developers, and I suspect that they're the people who are currently rushing to its defense.
This ain't rocket surgery.
Who modded this insightful? YouTube now supports direct H.264 video without the Flash wrapper. It works fine!
The CB App. What's your 20?
apple should drop that $99y just to come free apps other phone systems do not have this level of lock in.
Check the cost on developing for WiMo sometime. Microsoft charges a registration fee and a $99 per app submission fee on top of taking 30% of the revenue.
This ain't rocket surgery.
Ladies and Gentlemen! Friends and Colleagues! Acquaintances and Strangers alike! You’ve all been duped! Hoodwinked! Bamboozled! What this here computery programy thingy you’ve all been using is closed! Closed! Now let me ask you this! If there’s a door, and you’d like to go through it, is it better if it is open or if it is closed? Why open of course! And how about this fine young lass right next to you sir, imagine it’s Friday night and she’s at your place and you’re ready to go, would you rather her legs be closed or open? You’d be a damn fool to say anything but open! And we all know of those unfortunate situations where a fool mother leaves her infant locked in the car on a hot summer day, and that poor little boy or girl ends up dying from the heat. Now tell me folks, couldn’t this all have been avoided if the window was open, instead of closed? So tell me, why on earth would you want software on your phone that’s closed? Well I’m here to tell you that you need to fear not when it comes to the iPhone because we support technologies that are open! So come on down, and buy what I’m sellin'!
without
Can you back up this claim with evidence, or are you just another astro-turfer or troll?
I can make a game for the AppStore for free and it actually costs Job's money since Apple pays for hosting and bandwidth.
Okay, so he has been a dick in his personal life. That has nothing to do with the topic. If you found out that Linus kicked his dog* would you stop using Linux? Or, if you're a Windows user, it's a well-known fact that Steve Ballmer has a violent temper which sometimes manifests itself through flying furniture (he's also a terrible dancer but, then again, so is Steve Wozniac). Is that enough to make you stop using Windows?
Lots of people have personality flaws. Hell, everybody has personality flaws, including you and I. That's life, get over it.
* Hypothetical example, I'm not claiming he does.
This ain't rocket surgery.
You're an idiot.
"Jobs is all about the vendorlock."
In the iPhone OS vs the world case, yes. But in the html5 vs Flash case it is Adobe who's looking for "vendorlock". Designers are "locked" with Flash if that's the rich media format for the Internet. The Flash format is open now, but still fully controlled by Adobe, no innovation can come from others with it.
I know people likes to mixed up everything just to prove their points, but in the spirit of the FSF, Steve Job is good here, Adobe is bad. I can enjoy rich html5 on every platform thanks to opensource projetcs like FireFox or WebKit. Flash only works on what Adobe decide to support.
Now bring on the offtopic rants about h.264 being own by Apple (which is innacurate), the AppStore being locked, the iPhone being closed source, etc.
Yes it does. http://www.youtube.com/html5
In Steve's post, he is more concerned about the poor performance of Flash on mobile devices than how "free" it is vs. H.264. Granted he brings up both points, but it's the first one that's the real focus.
In the end the user wants to play his Facebook games and Apple says 'you can't on My iPhone or iPad' and they say 'okay' and play on their computer instead.
Do they ditch the iPhone or iPad? Nope..... They go buy another one!
When the general public actually decides to grow a pair things will change.
I wouldn't necessarily put it that way.
I paid $199 for my iPhone and I can't play Facebook games? Well, I guess that's just the way it is. At least until my best buddy starts doing it with his Android/WebOS/Symbian phone. When I see someone in my peer group doing that, that's when I'll say, "Wow! I know what my next phone is going to be!"
Kind of like the Mac and Windows--you'll see one person switch and show off what they can do. That'll inspire someone else. That'll inspire a few more people. And so on and so on.
There are several assumptions in that statement.
1) Adobe will actually deliver desktop flash on Android. This is still a huge question all the demos I've seen are flash video. Haven't seen a lot of demos of farmville.
2) Android manufactures will actually deliver the updates needs to use flash. Most of the currently shipping Android phones won't take the 2.2 update, of the ones that will OS updates are released by the hand manufacturer or the carrier which take weeks or month to get their customizations made and update images released.
3) Flash on Android won't suck. Adobe doesn't have a great record here and could easily get this wrong and cause all the OS to crash, run slowly, kill the battery and drive 1000s of Android users to the iPhone.
4) And all of that needs to happen before Facebook and others start releasing games in html5 or the AppStore.
FYI, you can use YouTube's HTML5 version nowadays as well, using YouTube's standard webpage in Safari.
[--- PGP key and more on http://www.root42.de ---]
I see a major misunderstanding here between Free(as in speach), free(as in beer), and "open". Apple is promoting "Open". They are still a for-profit company selling closed devices to access an "open" system. They have no shame here, nor should they.
They make a device to access the web, one non-standard plugin doesn't make the grade for being usable on their hardware so it's not supported. Their options are: 1. Request Adobe fixes their product for mobile devices (10.1, sure we will see with Android being the guinea pig) 2. Apple makes their own workaround (good, but this hack job will probably not good enough or legal). 3. Exclude it as other, more open, standards can fill the void. Apple chose #3. Sorry Adobe, its just business.
Other companies are captalizing on this, as they should be! They are betting on farmville addicts choosing their (possibly inferior) platform over Apple's because of flash support, so they get some sales from people that wouldn't have chosen them without it.
Apple has no problem with that, they just want the people that bought their product having a better overall experience, and then buying v2.0 and v3.0, and also telling their friends. We long-time mac users know what it's like to not have everything, but the stuff we do have actually works
If it doesn't have a start menu or a knockoff start menu(yes I'm looking at you Linux), then it's obviously evil here. How dare you question them in their own house! But in all seriousness, apple didn't want any other apps on their device until the public demanded it basically. They did want them to be web based, which sucked beyond imagining. Apple is making this OS more and more open constantly, but they won't ever be "free", that's just unrealistic
Not only does it work fine in the stock Mobile Safari, but it's a cleaner view than in most desktop browsers because there's lex extraneous embed chrome in the webview: http://l.freeke.org/wkwlg
In the end the user wants to play his Facebook games and Apple says 'you can't on My iPhone or iPad' and they say 'okay' and play on their computer instead.
Do they ditch the iPhone or iPad? Nope..... They go buy another one!
When the general public actually decides to grow a pair things will change.
You are right, even though I don't give a rat's ass about Flash games, I guess the iPod Touch I just bought is completely useless. Apple just stole my money and gave me a brick that looks nice and does a great deal of cool stuff. Oh, No! I just realized OS X won't play my Windows Games. Damn you apple! What? My Wii won't play my XBox games? Boycott Nintendo! My Playstation won't play Advance Wars!!? Call the SEC! Call the Better Business Borough! Let us rise up against these evil companies for screwing us over! Attica! Attica! Attica!
</sarcasm>
Guess what, not everyone cares about what you care about. I don't care about flash, I hated it 10 years ago, I hate it now. If flash is important to you, there are plenty of competitors out there. Don't want an iPad, don't buy one, or get one of the 20+ competitors that will be out by the end of the year or a Tablet PC. There is no law stating that Apple must support flash. If they don't want to, they don't have to.
Slow Down Cowboy! It's been 1 hour, 47 minutes since you last successfully posted a comment
No,
Your Mac crashes because the OS cannot gracefully handle an error with an application, imagine how often your Mac would crash if the same amount of low quality software that windows users have access to were available. For fecks sake even Windows can do this now, I've not had Flash crash my Linux, Win 7 or XP boxen in years because they are capable of handling the problem gracefully. At the absolute worse, a bad plugin takes down my browser, not my OS.
BTW, Flash works just fine on my Ubuntu 9.04 (yes, I'm getting around to upgrading) laptop, C2D T series 2.1 GHz, 2 GB RAM and an Intel GMA 4500HD and you're telling me a "superior" Mac has problems.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
but it's their control over the thing that makes it as easy to use as possible.
When is the last time you used Apple's YouTube application (which ironically, CAN play YouTube videos). It is an utter JOKE. But too bad - if you decide to use a regular browser to deal with the many deficiencies in Apple's application, you can't play videos! How is this good? It's pathetically comedic at best.
Doing research before spouting off makes you credible. You clearly got a high rating because some one was just as bad at research as you clearly demonstrate.
But if they hate flash on the iPhone, there is NOTHING apple can do to improve it.
Make their own? Just because it's difficult and would take a long time doesn't mean it's impossible, and if it's open, it should catch on quickly.
Ah, but then there would be that nice no-compete clause... and the appearance of just playing "catch-up"...
Aye... and who needs Windows in a world without walls?
Everyone seems to accept the walled garden concept of games consoles. So why is Apple's approach to the iPhone and iPad any different?
Your console is subsidised, your mobile phone is often subsided on a contract. No difference as far as I can see.
Posted by an AC. Instant credibility.
Here something i found also ...
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2010/042210-analyst-html5-far-from-killing.html
Let the blasting begin Mr AC :)
Let me say this for Mr. AC: as long as even the Openness Weenies will support a closed system over an open one, of course Flash will win over HTML5.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
That way you only made the ipad more attractive: see, there are a lot of free apps! So they'll get the money of hosting back several times through hardware sales.
WTF are you talking about ? How is iPhone OS an "open" platform as opposed to any of its competitors ? I see how you could try to (dishonestly) convince us that Apple's software is more Open than adobe : that's arguable but why not. What I cannot see is how iPhone OS is an open platform, when you compare it to other similar platform (i.e. mobile OSs) The iPhone OS locks you into the Appstore, which is itself censored by Apple. How is that open ? Symbian, Android, WebOS (RIP), MeeGo, Blackberry OS are all more Open. (Not to mention Symbian and Android are Open-source but that another debate) Jobs is just using the fact that Adobe's software (which is rather closed) doesn't work on the iPhone (which is also a very closed system) to attack adobe but in fact the only thing that we see here is the following : systems have to be open because else we don't have interoperability which is exactly what we get when we take the champions of closed system together : Adobe and Apple. Now I already am hearing morons yelling in the back of the room about how Apple supports Open-source and blahblahblah webkit blahblahblah. Webkit is not an Apple product.It's not developed by Apple. Apple just uses it and by paying very little money has ensured the control over it's development strategy. But don't be fooled Apple and Adobe has very similar approach to the CE business. Both this company use free (as in beer) sotfware to capture an audience and then lock these people into their integrated solution. So yes this article says Jobs is a hypocritical lying piece of crap. Because he is.
I'm not a fan of Flash after dealing for the past several years with a 400MHz (yeah, MHz) PPC G4 and what I believe to be USB 1.0. Up until the latest OS upgrade, Apple supported their old product line and I was happy - unless I was reading the local newspaper's website with its plethora of flash animations. Scrolling became a Herculean task with killing the browser its only outcome. So I'm not happy with any software implementation that acts AS IF it uses spinlocks for cross-platform timing.
Steve Jobs did his job: made an executive's decision and holding the entire company AND - THEIR - CUSTOMERS to that decision. Flash or Battery Life? Flash or Responsiveness? Apple got spanked in the 90's for selling monitors with one inch less viewable area than what was advertised clearly as monitor dimension. Apple learned its lesson to deliver hardware that meet its specifications.
Adobe really needs to look into offloading much of their flash implementation into the most energy efficient component of mobile devices - its FPGA, not software. Keep the processor free to perform the collect-and-forward tasks of data streaming. Adobe, if they are really serious, would provide a reference design and Altera/Lattice/Xilinx firmware libraries (Cores). Apple should investigate making FPGA space available to their developers & downloads for their customers just as if it were code space.
Now that would be truly visionary.
If you feel the necessity to swear, just fucking do it you asshole. Self-censoring your own words just make you come across as an immature teen, who has just discovered the pleasure of cursing, but still puts in asterisks in case Mummy sees what you are doing and scolds you for using "naughty words".
And you posted anonymously anyway, so what the hell, just go for it.
Your reading comprehension needs some work. Your first sentence shows that you couldn't understand the parent post's first sentence.
He said that Apple makes a closed device (iPhone) for accessing an open platform (the web). Please learn to read with both your eyes and mind open before typing your next rant.
I want to shoot the messenger!
Everything Goolge does is beta and the /. Crowd eats it up. And yet Youtube putting up a beta version of their site using and open standard bypassing a proprietary format is a bad thing in your mind.
Who's the hypocrite now.
I want to shoot the messenger!
All these discussions about how Flash needs to be replaced seems to miss the point that there is a lot more content out there in Flash format - not just video. What alternatives are there for replacing Flash presentations on the web, flash demos, games etc? Are we talking about replacing them with java applets? But java doesn't run on the iphone, does it?
So then what is actually being said is that ALL content in flash format - whether video or plain actionscripted files, should all be replaced with....what exactly? Javascript and HTML canvas? so Jobs is recommending that content which has taken 100s of 1000s of hours to develop in Flash should all be recreated in HTML5 ? for what? so that Apple can continue to prevent users who purchased Apple products from running content on the devices they purchased?
[blockquote]What am I missing here?[/blockquote]
The fact that you're wrong. You should actually try things instead of just doing thought experiments.
On a touch in safari when you click on a youtube video it opens the video in the youtube player and plays just fine. This works if the video came from youtube.com directly or was embedded in another site.
Job's argument was that with open web standards, if he/Apple/or_it's_customers are unhappy with the browsing experience, Apple can throw money at it and make a better browser.
It's clear that a browser is not something you can throw money at to improve it. Microsoft tried with Mosaic, and look where that got them. Apple didn't throw money at the problem of creating an HTML renderer, they forked KHTML and then Steve Jobs takes credit for creating webkit in his letter on adobe.
In essence, Apple has been selling a seamless user experience. It has never been selling freedom and often times you trade in some freedom for convenience. That is Apple's market and his argument.
What would Ben Franklin say? Those who buy Apple deserve to suffer?
I own one of the last generation of PPC notebooks Apple made. It's true, it has a slow 1.67GHz G4 processor. But at it's speed it should offer somewhat decent flash, but nearly all video's are choppy for it. I never got a satisfactory answer. Apple points to Adobe saying they code a crappy implementation. Adobe points to Apple talking about not having accent to libraries they need. All I know is flash is ultra slow.
All I know is that you can at least view flash on it.
Frankly, while I think Apple is crummy on things sometimes, I know the Internet is also one giant waambulance too. If Apple wanted a super closed off garden, it's not going to get that with HTML5 anyway. I also think flash sucks, so I'd rather have it die as well.
But, it won't. At least, HTML5 isn't going to kill it. Or at least, not any time soon. Even if you could do everything in HTML5 that you can do in Flash (which is probably not true, or at least, there will be cases where Flash offers superior performance) Flash has superior authoring tools to anything we'll see for HTML5 in a while.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
He doesnt care that you should care, or not.
Flash apps circumvent the app store, you can make a website app through flash for free (such as a game) and Jobs doesn't get to enforce his Apple Tax.
HTML5 doesn't? http://www.osnews.com/story/23097/Quake_II_Ported_to_HTML5
The only reason that apple doesn't have more users is because people are more uncomfortable with change than they are distressed by choices.
But proprietary vendors don't want the competition. Steve Jobs mentioned the MPEG-LA consortium is looking through their patents to see if they can shutdown Ogg Theora before it takes root.
Ogg Theora has been out there since 2001. If it hasn't taken root by now, it ain't gonna.
I paid $199 for my iPhone and I can't play Facebook games?
That's not a bug, it's a feature.
Should have been +5 Insightful.
Okay, so he has been a dick in his personal life. That has nothing to do with the topic. If you found out that Linus kicked his dog* would you stop using Linux?
One thing is not remotely like the other. If I found out that Linus was trying to anticompetitively leverage software patents, I probably would switch to *BSD because of what it would likely mean for the future of Linux: nothing good. Likewise, while Steve Jobs is doing this, or for that matter, doing any of the other shit he's been doing to limit user choice, I would use something else. And I do.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I've commented on this in a prior thread just above this one.
HTML5 is still quite new and the Quake port is a brilliant POC. Maybe one day we'll see HTML5 as an important selling point for SmartPhones but alas today, i refer you to this news article.
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2010/042210-analyst-html5-far-from-killing.html
Sure, that's fine and makes perfect sense. But the post I was responding to was a complaint about Jobs's personal life.
This ain't rocket surgery.
Forgot to delete edit off the end... try this link if the other doesn't work.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I sincerely hope that no one contributing to this thread is in any kind of support position. What happens when I click on a YouTube video in Safari is that it opens the usual page with video and comments, and where the video should be playing is an error message, and I quote, "You need to upgrade your Adobe Flash Player to watch this video." So where does this "thought experiment" end, exactly?
My understanding about the Adobe/Apple dispute is that Adobe has dragged its feet on using Apple's Cocoa framework and this has caused many of the problems. Way back when the three Apple frameworks were announced (Classic, Carbon, Cocoa) I think it was Steve Jobs said that Classic would run legacy OS 9 apps, Carbon would work in the immediate future to program for OS X but Cocoa was the distant future. Cocoa was much more advanced than Carbon. Over the years Apple developed both Carbon and Cocoa but put more advancements in Cocoa. Originally Adobe used Carbon to transition its products like Photoshop and Flash. But they were reluctant to move to Cocoa as this would require parts of their code to be rewritten. In their roadmap for 64 bit, Apple originally proposed a 64 bit Carbon, but later dropped this when they announced Leopard.
In OS X, Quartz handles image and video rendering; however the advanced stuff exists only in Cocoa like the H.264 rendering. My understanding is that for Flash, Adobe kept it under the Carbon framework. Since it was missing some things that they needed like H.264, they wrote their implementation instead of using Apple's. This explains why Flash on Macs is extremely buggy and CPU intensive. It renders everything in software rather than allowing the OS to use any available hardware. Recently some true hardware (GPU) acceleration has been released, but this didn't solve original issue that total software rendering is inefficient. Using the OS APIs is more efficient as it is more optimized to use any hardware. I guess Adobe wanted Apple to develop the APIs in Carbon but Apple wanted Adobe to use Cocoa rather than develop APIs that they already existed in another framework.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Without. Just tried it on my wife's.
The very first iPhone, and every iPhone since has shipped with a youtube viewing app. It's one of the basic features of the phone.
There are already facebook and popular flash games on the app store - Bejeweled 2 is probably one of the biggest. It even links back directly to facebook from the iPhone.
"HTML5, the budding specification for multimedia in Web applications, will not displace proprietary rich Internet technologies, such as Adobe Flash/Flex or Microsoft Silverlight, anytime soon, an analyst report released this week said'. OK, understood, it's new and therefore it sucks, and the existing "proprietary systems" are better. You support proprietary systems then? Wait, isn't that why we hate Apple? Dammit is this /. or not. I'm confused :(
You seem to be missing the entire point of this sub-thread, then changing it's direction to make your own, entirely different point.
I'm not saying that Jobs isn't an arrogant dick--I sure as hell couldn't work for him--only that a post complaining about his treatment of his daughter isn't relevant to this thread.
I can't claim to hang with the same crowd as CEOs of large, successful corporations but I've met and occasionally worked with a few in the past, mostly by random chance. With only a couple of exceptions, they all exhibited a degree of of megalomaniacal dickishness. It seems to come with the position. If one were to exclude buying a service or product on the basis of the personal behavior of the CEO of the company that developed it, he or she might have go live in a cave.
This ain't rocket surgery.
It means that by making mobile Safari free from the Apple store like policies gives Apple bonus points. My friend, web has always been free and every OS out there has allowed you to access the web freely. Apple does not get any kudos for it.
We are still comparing the high closed and restricted App store.
You sound like a blind Apple fanboy. There are people who like to play farmville. No problems. It is important for them. Yes. Apple loses those customers just because of it's stupid hypocrisy.
I don't believe I ever made any such statement. Not only is it in beta, you have to join. Hit me up when its available as an option on the front page or in the user settings.
Sharing a car is still traveling by car, and teleconferencing isn't going anywhere.
But yes, there are plenty of other options, like riding a horse or building a personal hovercraft. The point remains that any of these options is an impractical mandate that 99% of people aren't going to use. For the 1% that will, more power to them.
A false choice traditionally means the preclusion of a viable option from the list, and the FSF's position is not a viable model for all applications on the web any more than their position is viable for all software development. There is certainly room for it among the other choices, but not discussing it when talking about prevailing parties isn't denying its existence. It's simply recognizing the reality that the third choices aren't viable candidates for dominance.
...Please RTFLA before stating how "open" it is compared to the iPhone SDK: http://www.android.com/market/terms/developer-content-policy.html With that said there are two problems I have with the FSF commentary: 1. I know people love to use the car metaphor but I feel it's an apples and oranges comparison because the average can open up their car hood check and refill the oil without causing the engine to stop running, whereas the average user of a computer cannot be expected (or trusted) to do the same. Apple allows people to use the Terminal for command line troubleshooting which frankly is more powerful than the average user should have. I love how the FSF always implies a certain level of arrogance by Apple in locking down certain portions of the operating system but personally I think it implies more arrogance the FSF's part by assuming that people are willing to take a bunch of time to learn (or for that matter care) about the difference between the GPL and proprietary software licensing. I appreciate Free and/or Open Source as the ideal software development method, but I'm realistic enough to realize that unless the GUI and for that matter, the overall user experience for Linux and other GPL projects improve to where the average user can use it Linux is going to remain a tech enthusiast and corporate server level OS. If and when that day comes I will happily switch but for the moment I find the user experience on my Mac to be less of a headache than the alternatives for personal use and I know many feel the same way. 2. Regarding the whole H.264 verses Theora debate, Steve Jobs is pushing the HTML5 standard as a flash alternative, and while I don't have enough hands on experience with as a method of streaming (seeing as few sites use it as of yet) to offer an educated opinion on how well it works, if the FSF has a problem with the H.264 codec as part of the HTML5 standard specs they should be taking it up with the WHATWG which is the organization responsible for drafting the specs, not Apple. If anything given the proprietary licensing of Flash coupled with the fact that to the best of my knowledge there is no existing free/open development tools for Flash if anyone is being hypocritical here it's the FSF for giving Apple flack for trying to push HTML5 as an open web standard alternative to Flash! As a side note I know people have been phobic about H.264 particularly where license fees are concerned (and I'd be lying if I didn't say I shared some of those concerns) but IMHO I have been using it for video work with both open source and proprietary software both types of which have existed without licensing and revenue problems to date, so if that does become a concern then I expect an alternative (such as Theora) will emerge into widespread usage as necessity dictates but until then, I'm realistic enough to expect the majority of users and developers to push H.264 as a part HTML5 because the majority of users already have it. Personally in the end I think mass usage is still the ultimate standard regardless of what any interest or organization may try to dictate and while I may not always agree with the majority of users and try to educate them about better alternatives to me that's still the true freedom of the web...
I'm honest enough to admit I lie to myself.
Everything on google is perpetually marked in Beta. People used GMail for like 5 years before the beta ended.
While Sullivan is free to criticize Apple for their proprietary software- and I wouldn't expect any less from the FSF- it is unfair to imply that Jobs is a hypocrite for his opinions on Adobe Flash.
Sullivan quotes Jobs, but he doesn't offer the full quote: "Apple has many proprietary products too. Though the operating system for the iPhone, iPod and iPad is proprietary, we strongly believe that all standards pertaining to the web should be open."
Jobs is admitting right there that Apple has many proprietary products, including iPhone OS. He is separating the OS from web standards, and while I agree with Sullivan that the web includes more than just HTML, I think he is stretching it to include the OS running on the device as part of web standards. The fact is that Safari follows open web standards (and developing standards), and Apple does not filter the content you can reach using Safari.
Sullivan's criticisms of Apple's walled garden are fine for what they're worth. Yes, Apple could, if they wanted to, filter content from Safari as they do for standalone apps, and being stuck using a proprietary system such as the iPhone can make it difficult to circumvent. But those complaints are the same general closed-source complaints that the FSF has been making for a long time. Steve Jobs ' letter did not say that everything Apple makes is dedicated to openness or user freedom- he was targeting his comments specifically about support for Flash in the context of Flash being the dominant format for videos on the web.
No its new therefore its not matured yet for industry acceptance.
Flash has been always the tool for this type of job, it has been that way for quite a long time, you have to simply be patient before we start seeing it fill in the gaps.
HTML5 is the future, but so are flying cars and jet-packs. HTML5 is a more realistic future though and has better POC's
Whatever Benjamin Franklin would say would be written on his iPad
There is no reason to create their own since there is already HTML5...
And of course Apple has contributed more to OSS through WebKit (One small part of their contribution) than Adobe has in total.
What phone were you playing facebook games on before? What Phone does Adobe have flash currently in production on?
I thought so, what an absurd argument. Blame the facebook developers or blame Adobe, you sure as heck can't blame Apple for something that does not exist on any mobile platform and they have no control over.
Surely whether Apple/Jobs are good or bad, have an agenda, have misbehaved in the past, want to rule the world etc. is irrelevant here; Jobs made some telling points about Flash's shortcomings which rang true to me. Don't shoot the messenger. I use a Mac and Flash is one big pain in the ass for me. I have to use Flashblock or all I see is that damned spinning ball.
"We are all born ignorant but one has to work hard to remain stupid". Steal this sig.: I did
One would almost think this system is written by lawyers.
Theoretically though, if he announced tomorrow that the iPhone OS was getting VP3 support, what would your reaction be?
I think that GP has a point that regardless of what Jobs does, the level of resentment from some people here (not necessarily you) and at the FSF will twist his meaning. If he announces Theora support I'm sure someone will claim it is an Embrace, Extend, Extinguish move in some way.
The current video situation on the Web is not ideal - H.264 is technically excellent, but it is patented. It is the "next mp3" - ubiquitous, and hampered for free software. It is a big step forward from what we did have though, where WMV (as just-different-enough to mp4 to be broken) stood a chance of becoming the defacto standard.
Little steps - HTML5 container first, then video formats.
My buddy's Android phone can't play Facebook games either.
Damn you Apple!
I drank what? -- Socrates
A lot of fallacies are commonly used. They don't stop being fallacies, though.
In order to establish this situation as a fallacy of false choice, there needs to be a viable option outside those discussed, and the discussion must be presented as being collectively exhaustive.
Simplification for convenience doesn't always rise to the level of fallacy--propositions that have technically possible, but practically impossible, additional options aren't false choice unless the proposition forecloses other options. In other words, discussions about whether the Democrat or the Republican will win the presidency does not present a false choice unless there is a condition that there are no other candidates in existence, and not mentioning them is not the same as denying their existence.
For example, consider the response to your asking your boss for a day off: "would you prefer Friday or Monday off?" That's not a false choice fallacy. It's just a choice. Despite there being additional options in existence, and despite the fact that you might truly want Wednesday off, you have two viable options. A false choice requires that you be able to choose the unlisted alternative.
That doesn't really exist here. There is zero chance of Theora being adopted as the sole codec of HTML5. There is simultaneously a low chance that H.264 will be the sole codec, but a virtually guaranteed probability that it will be the most popular codec.
As for the matter of it being an impractical choice, there are a lot of smart coders working on making a free codec into something practical.
And those codecs might conceivably achieve hardware support in time to make them viable options for HTML6. But no achievement will make them viable for HTML5 to the exclusion of H.264 and/or Flash-native codecs.
I think it's more about wanting to have the freedom of having both HTML5 and Flash work.
Blackberry OS is actually definitely less open. While yes you can deploy your own apps without paying a fee, thats not the way it always was. Aside from their awful Java SDK, the actual OS is very closed. Can't update your software on Linux, in fact Mac support was new to late 2009 for that. I'd always hoped Blackberry would goto a Linux OS, but maybe RIM's purchase of QNX will at least give them UNIX under the hood, even if it isn't an open UNIX... The rest of your mobile platforms are great though :)
Ogre Wedding Planners llc.
The HTM5 wrapper is beta, but the direct h264 support is used by many devices including smartphones, to get around flash... i.e. even after Androids get flash they won't be using it instead of their built in Youtube player...
Ogre Wedding Planners llc.
But that isn't the browser and the reason YouTube videos can now be viewed in the browser on iPhone is because YouTube doesn't use flash to show the video on iPhone (but equally, the iPhone can't see any annotations on videos on YouTube because only the flash player has support for this at the moment).
You also can't view YouTube videos embeded on other websites on the iPhone as it the embed feature is done through a flash player (and is one of the things HTML5 will have trouble replicating due to it requiring cross site javascript).