I think your comments here are off base. The SWF standards (and associated standards like RTMP) are available for free on the Adobe website. You are permitted

I think your comments here are off base. 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. 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".