I assume they changed facetime to not infringe the patent (which was later found invalid anyway) in response so couldn't they just have opened up the changed version?
If that lawsuit affected their ability to go forward with facetime, facetime surely wouldn't exist at all so I don't understand why it explains facetime continuing to exist but not being open.
It's since exploded into things beyond just FaceTime. The FaceTime one though, Apple ultimately lost their appeal in 2019 and paid out $440M for FaceTime infringement (so, yes, legally speaking, VirnetX won). It's now over VPN patents which had some patents cancelled.
With FaceTime being legally infringing... hard to make an open standard. Plus, why would they now? Not only would it primarily benefit the competition; but it would also undermine FaceTime's security. The beauty of FaceTime is that it is very much tied to physical devices, making it very expensive and difficult to spam call without detection. An open standard would likely lose that ability, causing spam video calls everywhere.
