Jobs’ explanation is laughable. Almost all of the criticisms thrown at Adobe apply to Apple as well. The “not an open standard” argument is perhaps the funniest. While it is true that Flash is by no means and open standard, apart from being proprietary and closed source, Apple’s products are no different. He himself admits so:

Though the operating system for the iPhone, iPod and iPad is proprietary, we strongly believe that all standards pertaining to the web should be open. Rather than use Flash, Apple has adopted HTML5, CSS and JavaScript – all open standards.

To add insult to injury, Apple’s preferred video codec, H.264, which it calls an “industry standard”, is in fact no more open than Flash itself. Indeed, it is the source of a corporate dispute that threatens to diminish the HTML5 open standard that Jobs so much praises.

Jobs goes on to praise Apple’s “openness”:

Apple even creates open standards for the web. For example, Apple began with a small open source project and created WebKit, a complete open-source HTML5 rendering engine that is the heart of the Safari web browser used in all our products. WebKit has been widely adopted. (…) Almost every smartphone web browser other than Microsoft’s uses WebKit. By making its WebKit technology open, Apple has set the standard for mobile web browsers.

What Jobs conveniently leaves out is that Webit itself was derived from an earlier, robust rendering engine, KHTML, brought to you by the fine folks at the KDE project, a GNU/Linux Desktop environment. The only reason why Webkit is free software is because, if Apple wanted to use KHTML’s previous code base, it had to be bound by the terms of its free and open source license, the GNU General Public License, or GPL. It is perfectly reasonable to speculate that, had Apple not been bound by the GPL’s terms, Webkit would be as closed as the rest of the countless proprietary projects Apple develops. There is no real commitment to free software on Apple’s part. It just does it when it is obligated by the software it “borrows” from. I know of no free software projects developed by Apple that are not the product of the legal “restrictions” (read “freedoms”) it has to respect in order to use previously-existing software. OS X’s kernel, Darwin, is a prime example.

Apple’s real reason for not supporting flash is one of market share and control. It has come to realise that, by controlling (and profiting from) third-party application development through tight control of its App store is a guaranteed way to remain competitive and extremely lucrative. They can’t do it on OS X, too late for that, so they do it on their new, crippled iPod OS. In doing so, they lock in their customers and keep their competitors behind their golden fence.