It's a fascinating combination of good points and utter rubbish, but mostly rubbish. The twisted hypocritical logic here is almost entirely devoid of the introspection I would expect from Jobs. More important, if that Jobs felt the need to release this kind of statement to defend this absolutely absurd position. Yet none of what he says makes the rational claims that Gruber has already made, i.e. Apple wants to limit the platform to exclusives, by preventing cross platform development environments, it makes it harder to not make exclusives for the dominant platform. It's a calculated move designed to keep people developing for the i* devices and ignore the Android devices. Instead we get the kinds of BS nonsense that we've seen people speculate on, but would indicate a kind of madness on the part of Apple.

For example:
Adobe’s Flash products are 100% proprietary. They are only available from Adobe, and Adobe has sole authority as to their future enhancement, pricing, etc. While Adobe’s Flash products are widely available, this does not mean they are open, since they are controlled entirely by Adobe and available only from Adobe. By almost any definition, Flash is a closed system.

This is fantastic news, direct from Steve Jobs himself, Apple is going to go completely open on their products! This means that I can go and buy a copy of iWorks from Oracle now, and get a Mac Clone from Dell and an HTC built iPhone! I wonder how long it'll be until OSX is available from Canonical? so excited, so excited

Other that this, the point is almost entirely incorrect. There are plenty of authoring and playback tools for flash not made by Adobe. It isn't exactly an "open standard", yes, but Adobe is not the sole source of flash stuff these days. Even a cursory search on google for flash creation tools brings back a bunch. Mr. Jobs, please follow this link http://lmgtfy.com/?q=flash+authoring+tools

Other points are better made, but some are still bad:
1) HTML5 is better
2) Webkit is neato
3) Apple never said they support the full web anyways
4) Most places have HTML5 video support nowadays, except for Hulu
5) Who needs flash for games anyway, i* devices have tons.
6) Flash = bad security
7) Flash = poor performance
8) Flash = eats batteries
9) Flash doesn't work great with touch
10) Third party content development tools suck! The people who use them suck! The crap that comes out of them sucks too! Anybody who think differently was born wrong!
11) Adobe should be making HTML5 authoring tools anyways.

What Apple should do is put Flash through the exact same approval process it puts other apps through. Make Adobe work for it, but don't just simply cut it off like a tantrum throwing child that can't share. If these are the problems with Flash, kick it back with comments and force Adobe to fix brokeness to get approval through the store. Adobe being open or not being open is a garbage point as I noted above. Apple doesn't require any of the apps in the app store to be open standards compliant. The mechanism for dealing with all of these problems is already there and it's simple -- the app store. There's no need to "work with Adobe", just reject it from the store the same way lots of apps are rejected after the screening process. Lots of apps eat batteries. Is that a new rejection criteria, "apps may not consume battery life."? If I want to run down my device in 5 hours instead of 10, that seems to be my problem.

1) HTML5 is still very very immature technology with almost no good toolchain support for authoring HTML apps. It's still a pile of languages glued together in a browser that sometimes makes something useful or interesting, but also really really processor intensive and slow. We all ooh and aah, everytime we see a canvas demo that eats up 100% CPU time on a quad core system displaying something that we all saw in 1996! By just this simple test, points 7-8 are almost completely invalid. Does flash perform worse than native apps and use more battery? Sure! So does playing an intensive game!

2) Webkit is neato, but webkit is a different thing than Flash. It makes no sense to compare the two. It's like comparing webkit and iworks for the iPad. By this logic, Apple should also not sell iWorks for those devices but just point everybody to Google Docs.

3) That's okay, that's why there are 3rd parties who can build stuff to support it for you.

4) Good point. This is definitely the wave of the future, Hulu needs to catch up. The point about hardware decoding is also fair I think.

5) i* devices do have tons of games true (Steve, I hope you now see the connection between entertainment software and platform sales, it's eluded you on the Mac for years). But those games are not flash games. I want to play flash games on my i* device. Period. I am the consumer, and I get to demand what I want to purchase. The only fair point I think is that most flash games don't work well via a touch interface. I have to agree with this. But there are also plenty of flash apps that are not games that would be amazing on an iPad. I want to use those. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1295052 And no bit of HTML5 will replace these kinds of things for at least 12-24 months. Flash is not just about video and games.

The i* platforms also do not have the most pieces of entertainment software of any platform. Apple needs to simply stop exaggerating their claims to the point of absurdity.

6,7,8) see point about app store rejection above.

9) Agreed, though some flash apps might work well. Or apps could be written to work well with it exactly the same as making an HTML5 canvas app work well with the i* devices. This BS about mouseover events, and device features is also true of the web, yet that doesn't seem to be a reason to yank Safari mobile off of the devices.

10) This is the most noticeable pile of utter garbage in this entire thing. Somebody here did a survey of the top i* device apps and many of them were made with third party tools or contained elements that are now in violation of the new terms. Most of those apps were of superior quality. Just because the tool chain is made by somebody else does not mean the output will suck. Conversely, just because the toolchain is Apple approved, does not mean that all apps that use that toolcahin are going to be free of suckage. There are lots of shitty apps in the app store, lots, and I'd bet the vast majority of them were written with the approved toolchain.

11) I think we can all agree that HTML5 is immature as a technology. Adobe makes great authoring tools. Therefore, Adobe should make great HTML5 authoring tools. I think we can all agree on this. Flash is eventually going to go away. But in the meantime it's still a useful piece of technology. Just because quartz timing devices will all eventually go away doesn't mean that we should just stop using quartz timing devices. But even if Adobe started today, flash would be a predominant force on the web for 3-5 years.

Finally, this is all a giant pile of misdirection. Point 10 is the key one not flash.