JD Confused

JD is confused about the statement made in a MS presentation with don and chris:

Chris: We’ve made our intentions clear with WPF/E; we’re not pretending [like Adobe is with Flash] that it is some kind of open standard. People are saying that Flash is good and WPF/E is evil, but we actually think our story is better [for the community] here.

JD says:

But I'd still like to hear from Chris and Don what they actually said and meant with quotes like "adobe pretends flash is standard"...

Adobe pretending Flash is an open standard is really quite easy to understand. Adobe gives the impression that Flash is open and does things like put out specs for each revision of the file format... however, unlike truely open specs, you don't even get to see the spec until a year or two after they ship the product that the spec corresponds to. Even then, the format itself contains proprietary sections like On2's video format. You can't even deal with those parts of the format without paying ridiculous licensing fees (like, $60,000 to get started with the On2 SDK and then royalties on your product). So, is Flash really open? Far from it. Remove the proprietary garbage or offer free SDKs to deal with it, or the format will never truely be open. If all you do is create content with Flex or the Flash IDE, this isn't something you have to worry about, but if you work for a vendor that creates tools that use the Flash file format as I do, then it becomes a huge pain in the ass.

[1] http://weblogs.macromedia.com/jd/archives/2007/04/understanding_f.cfm