To add to jsz0's correct observation, H.264 does not show up at all under the first section discussing proprietary vs. open standards.

H.264 shows up once under the heading Second, there’s the "full web" but not really a primary point.

The main H.264 is in the section Fourth, there’s battery life. Jobs wrote that the benefit of H.264 vs. flash was that there was hardware decryption support for it. The result of hardware decryption support was a doubling of battery life vs. software decryption (e.g. flash).

I see a lot of jumping from Job's discussion of open vs. proprietary to his advocacy of H.264. While there are serious problems with the openness of H.264 (from an OSS POV), Jobs tied battery life to H.264 in his objection of flash codecs, not openness.

People are making this jump because Job's is committing the fallacy of special pleading when he applies his rule of openness to Flash but not to H.264.

But the whole point in this debate is that Flash is also, for better or worse, an industry standard.

Was an industry standard.

And that's the point, flash has some real drawbacks and since it's not an open standard with multiple implementations, it stagnated while Adobe thought it had no competition.

That's a fair point. I think that's more or less how Google approaches it even though they are not fans of closed web formats.

I do think there is a world of difference between a big complex closed platform exclusively available from Adobe and H.264 which has a variety of encoders/decoders available from multiple license holders. I seem to recall in the past Adobe has licensed in Flash to Nokia in almost the same way. Nokia ported & optimized the code for some of their handsets (N900 and others) It would be interesting to know if Adobe offered a similar arrangement to Apple. That would completely debunk everything Apple has been saying if they had the flexibility to control the Flash implementation on the iPhone themselves.

Is there a specification?

I think "de facto standard" is a more appropriate phrase for Flash.

Yes, there is (http://www.adobe.com/devnet/swf/).

It is even available gratis (H.264 specification is not).

H.264 specification is available gratis: http://www.itu.int/rec/T-REC-H.264-200903-S/en

I stand corrected, thanks.

Flash isn't an open standard by any useful definition.

Sure they specified the container format and data structures (just like with the MS Office formats), but everybody had figured that part out a long time ago because it's obvious and easy to capitalize on by developing an extractor. The runtime APIs are incredibly hard to reverse-engineer, comprise the vast bulk of the Flash implementation, and are the entire reason for the plugin's instability.

Interesting, but I don't see how one could create a complete implementation without a spec for the Sorensen Spark codec.

FFmpeg has reverse engineered it and there is an open source decoder and some documentation.

Sorenson Spark == H.263 (not a typo), which is documented. The problem with Flash is VP6, although FFMPEG reverse engineered it.

Actually, it is based on a draft h.263, not the final h.263.

One of the older flash specification did document it. The svq3 specification was removed from swf specs around time it was made available under more liberal license (Sorenson probably didn't agree with wider specs availability).