Venkatesh Hariharan, author of the Open Source India blog, has made a post that quotes Jonathan Gay, co-creator of the Flash, on the challenges in using proprietary standards.  It’s a good read demonstrating the real & practical roadblocks that royalty-based licensing schemes such as those that exist for the AVC/H.264 video standard that lead to Macromedia (the ones that developed Flash before being purchased by Adobe) to choose an alternative codec from On2 (now owned by Google) due to a much smaller licensing burden.