But Google can support Flash and work towards opennessHere's the thing, though. Mozilla and Google, over the past year, have basically used the video-codecs thing as a publicity stunt. LOOK AT ME I'M SO PURE AND OPEN AND NOT LIKE THOSE VICIOUS CLOSED EVIL APPLE NAZIS (except please please please don't ask us about all that proprietary stuff we still do, please). It's hard not to see this as hypocritical.
So it's perfectly reasonable to, for example, call Google out on that. If they're really serious about openness, but need to make some compromises to deal with legacy proprietary stuff, why was this the specific compromise? Why not, say, keep H264 support in the element while encouraging people to re-encode, and cut Flash? That at least gets you progress toward an open standard -- HTML5 -- if not a completely ideologically pure platform.
And especially given the fact that H264 has already literally won -- in the mobile market, in the broadcast market, in the home-entertainment market -- while Flash players which spool out H264-encoded video are essentially interchangeable with HTML5 elements which spool out H264-encoded video, it's hard to see this as a genuine move in support of "openness".
It should be obvious that Google's hope is anyone using HTML5 video will eventually move to WebM exclusively.
This is the real point, I think. Google, I'm pretty sure, doesn't actually give a shit about openness; they care about getting people to use platforms they can control. See the requirements you have to meet to get the actual Android platform (you know, the one with the useful Google apps). See their ongoing spats with sites like Facebook, which are rooted more in Google not getting access to/control over data than any noble attempt to serve privacy. And see WebM, the codec Google owns, and which they're going to ram down everyone's throat via every channel they can use.