Actually, it was very clear. Jobs promised, in no uncertain words, that Apple will make Facetime an open standard. I remember that well, I was quite excited about that.
He lied and I'm quite surprised that virtually no one gave Apple the hard time they deserve for lying during a keynote speech.
To quote http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FaceTime: "Upon the launch of the iPhone 4, Jobs promised that Apple would work in due course with standards bodies to make the FaceTime protocol an "open standard." As of May 2011, it is not yet known to have been ratified by any standards body, and the extent of work by Apple with regards to this promise is unclear as Apple has not released technical specifications for the service. FaceTime is not currently supported on any non-Apple devices."
If I recall correctly, this was also back when Apple was tooting the "standards are the wave of the future" horn pretty loudly during their short war with Adobe.
Now that that is more or less over, Apple is back to not really caring about it because frankly, most people have forgotten already.
I was just highlighting that Google went above and beyond here. They are actively participating in the IETF realtime web group and have actually released some code. They could have just released some API docs, and some header files and wait for others to build an implementation while they still use their proprietary code.
Something like this happened to AMF format and Adobe. They release some specs, and then people started to implement Flash servers, except the specs sucked and a lot of stuff had to be reverse engineered.
Apologies. Given the comment you were replying to, I took it to be an attempt to parry the charge that no specs have been released by attempting to frame it as a call for an open source implementation (and therefore Apple would have not broken that promise, since that's not the promise they made).
"Now FaceTime is based on a lot of open standards: H.264 video, AAC audio, and a bunch of alphabet soup acronyms. And we’re going to take it all away. We’re going to the standards bodies, starting tomorrow, and we’re going to make FaceTime an open industry standard." - Steve Jobs
Seriously, asking a question gets down voted? No. Asking a simple question seeking confirmation of something, is merely that, a question. It's spurs conversation. Downvotes are not for things you disagree with. They are for comments that detract from the quality of HN. The answers in response answered the question.
Seriously. There should be a way to flag down vote abuse.
