Not even speaking for FLA description. I’ve liked Flash a lot – it had a great potential for making web AND desktop applications much more user-friendly, interactive and intuitive. It had the potential of bringing the interactivity we have now on iPhone (and similar) several years before iPhone appeared. But they failed. They wanted to suck the market as much as possible making no real efforts in developing the technology and like each company doing so they got f*** and I’m happy with that.

Why didn’t they make a decent, hardware accelerated SWF player for all platforms?
Why didn’t they make at least an open API so that SWFs can be embedded and integrated with something else?
Why didn’t they opened the SWF standard so someone else can write a fast player if they can’t do so?

HTML5 is open, as open as every other standard on the web – it has a absolutely free, available description on the web – free of any registrations too. Just like HTML, SVG, XML, etc. I still think that Flash has something very advantageous in its platform – the development GUI, but I’m pretty sure that Adobe’s pinheads won’t make any effort and will loose completely, which is a pretty normal consequence in the market.

http://www.faqs.org/patents/app/20100153929

In this case they quote LLVM IR (no surprises given they have been contributing to this open source project even though they are going to seal off the project with these sorts of patents). Completely invalid as they are just patenting the whole UCSD p-System.

Any JavaScript frontend for generating IR would violate this patent (they even mention LLVM IR explicitly in this patent). The patent harms anyone considering using LLVM as an intermediate between JavaScript and back-end machine specific executables.

Given this is one of the prime means of accelerating their HTML5+JavaScript efforts it seems they are just as much about empire building as Adobe’s proprietary efforts (i.e. you can’t call Apple highminded in this discussion … just more attempts at accumulating market power).

Some thoughts of what could happen if that headline above could become a reality.
Most probably you’ve already heard about Steve Jobs dislike of the Adobe Flash Player. A War that started when it was announced that the iPad will not support Flash an…

You seem to be confusing free as in beer with free as in speech. The fact that you don’t need to pay a fee to use the canvas does not make the canvas open.

Say I want to develop a “canvas 2.0″ with some changes and added features.
Would the W3C license allow me to do that?
As a layman, looking at the W3C terms it doesn’t seem like it.

Why do you think Apple does not donate the canvas, rather than licensing it?
If it’s the same thing as you seems to claim, wouldn’t it look better when trying to make them self look like proponents of open standards?

See–in 2007, HTML5 was the work of WHAT-WG, a group *unrelated* to W3C. WHAT-WG did not have a policy on patent licensing. But later, WHAT-WG started working with W3C, which *does* have a patent policy. And now Apple does adhere to that policy with respect to Canvas, just as they said they would.

Ask Mozilla if Canvas is Apple proprietary. Ask Opera if Canvas is Apple proprietary. Ask anybody who actually knows what the hell is going on with HTML5. They will tell you that you’re wrong.