Adobe is more open than Apple ever was.

Remember that Flash was originally Macromedia Flash. Adobe has made it progressively more open and standards-based with every post-Macromedia version. The SWF file is well documented. ActionScript 2 and 3 are well-documented and standardized. AS3 is even ECMAScript compliant. Now the save format for Flash CS5 is an XML file rather than a memory dump.

Adobe is the same company that took pretty standard PostScript and embedded fonts and images into the file to make PDF, for which they have always published the file specs. OS X's main graphics output is based on PDF. How's that for open?

Adobe maintains that their authoring applications are where the money is. After all, their Flash Player is free and has clones (which are made that much better by them opening the file format). You can make Flash with the HaXe programming language. You can make Flash with Namo FreeMotion. You can make Flash with any number of open-source tools and any number of specialized single-purpose $10 commercial titles (just for banners, just for photo galleries, just for animation, etc.).

You can use other tools even more easily for what their other products do. PhotoShop is an image editor. After Effects is a film postproduction package. InDesign is for desktop publishing. Illustrator is for graphic design and layout. Hell, how many HTML editors are there to compete with DreamWeaver? Almost any office suite can output to PDF. Yet their applications sell for hundreds of dollars and the suites of them for a couple thousand.

Yeah, they really need a closed format, like JPEG for PhotoShop or XHTML for DreamWeaver. Give me a break.

Oh, and the next time I read that Flash is nothing but video, please let it be a joke and not some misinformed "We only just now Evolved to use the internet 2.0 years ago" Web2.0 drivel. Try getting a plain vanilla video container to present Bow Man, Portal: The Flash Version, anything from the Protector series (or anything from Kongregate at all), any of the interactive Flash software tutorials, interactive Flash sales brochures, the media players on sites like MySpace, or flashcard systems for kids in school. Make Matroska or H.264 by themselves do anything else that requires user interaction, conditional branches, handling of multiple input files, and real-time animation.

Flash Player (or Gnash, or SWFDec) is a VM with libraries and a graphics system built in. It is not just a codec, and in fact it already supported multiple video codecs, containers, and compression schemes before all of this publicity -- including VP6 from On2! Support for VP8 probably would have happened even if Google hadn't bought On2.

I really wish you people who know nothing of how programming, web design, media production, and graphic design are done would just go back to playing with your cool toys and leave the bitching and moaning about formats, containers, codecs, languages, authoring tools, and playback VMs