I think your comments here are off base.<p>The SWF standards (and associated standards like RTMP) are available for free on the Adobe website. You are permitted to construct alternative implementations based on this specification. I think it meets the definition of an open standard.<p>Would HTML not be an open standard if the only browser we had was IE, and it was horribly buggy? No - the quality of the available implementations is irrelevant to a standards "openness".