I'm not a big fan of Flash. It's great for doing certain things, but it's also used in places where HTML/CSS + JS would have done just as well. I avoid it unless there's no other choice.

The website failed the 'Skim the front page and try and figure out what it's for' test.

Anyone care to summarize the tedious waffle?

tl;dr

How is this not Adobe saying "Just use Flash, Trust Me"? What exactly is now open that wasn't before?

I did notice that amongst others, the SWF and RTMP format specs. are now freely available. IIRC, the SWF spec. used to be behind an agreement that limited you to using it to produce content for Adobe's player, rather that writing your own player. I'm not sure when that changed.

I guess this is partly a move against Apple, and also $10M of investment injected into new flash apps.

Yeah, I see this as a fairly transparent move against both Apple and MS.

The specs went to the current licensing scheme in May of 2008, with the launch of the Open Screen Project.

I think it's more free as in "Free Trade" (between big players) than free as "Free Software".

The only thing not open source about Flash is the SockWave Flash Player.