A friend of mine who is an Apple employee, Quinn Taylor, tweeted, on the day of the iPad launch, about the use of Flash by Hulu and other online video providers. Presumably, he is responding to criticisms that the new iPad, as well as older iPhones, do not support flash and won’t play videos from Hulu. This is what he said:

When is Hulu going to get with the times and support H.264 and HTML 5 like YouTube & HD content? Flash is an enemy to openness & innovation.

So apparently, a system which requires a proprietary SDK to create videos, which then need a proprietary (free) player in order to view videos, is an “enemy to openness.”

Of course, the iPad isn’t exactly the perfect friend to openness. I mean, to develop anything for the iPad, you have to download the proprietary SDK, use it only on a newer Mac, pay to join Apple’s iPhone developer program, submit any developed application to Apple, hope that Apple approves your app, wait for people to find your app in Apple’s App Store, and then if it gets that far, users can download and use the app on the proprietary iPad device.

I just want to point out that on the conversation of enemies to openness, we could use the new iPad as a perfect example, as everything is locked down and closed from beginning to end.