Old news: There’s an Adobe and Apple pissing match going on, wherein an Apple spokesperson says this:
“Someone has it backwards–it is HTML5, CSS, JavaScript, and H.264 (all supported by the iPhone and iPad) that are open and standard, while Adobe’s Flash is closed and proprietary,” said spokeswoman Trudy Muller in a statement.
The snarky part of me thinks that this is two companies arguing about which level of hell they represent. (It’s still hell, guys!)
But the reasonable part of me wants to point out that one part of the Apple statement is worth looking at – the assertion that H.264 is open. Because I certainly don’t consider it to be – not even a little.
Standard? Sure. The specs are well known, it’s widely implemented and is for the most part interoperable. But I have a pretty specific definition of open, a word that is highly over-used and over-stretched. It’s basically this:
It’s open if I don’t have to ask anyone for permission to use it. Or ship it. Or improve on it.
Does H.264 pass this test? Nope. I have to pay someone before I can ship it in a product, even one of moderate success. It’s a sacred cow where the kind of innovation that we’ve seen on the web – a model from which Apple has benefited from like few others – just doesn’t happen. H.264 is locked up behind a glass wall, which you can look at and pay to enter, but it doesn’t have the fungible, open and distributed innovation quality that the rest of the web enjoys.
So standard? Sure. But not open. Huge difference.
