I really don't understand why Silicon Valley type geeks get so excited about the alleged advent of "free" and "standard" web technologies such as HTML5 and SVG. First, as this story illustrates, these are not "free". More importantly, these are not "standard". SVG for example has existed as a finalized, commitee underwritted standard for more than eleven years now, yet not a single browser supports more than a subset of it, and each a different subset. Even if it had been supported by IE from the beginning (Adobe doesn't even bother to support their plug-in btw), web developpers would have faced the pain of making their app working across browser, which is bad enough currently with the JS situtation.
Instead of having these commitee designed pseudo "standard" existing in abstract document and leaving it up to multiple browser and platforms to implement their own interpretation of it, I much prefer the model in which a few vendors develop mature plug-ins such as Flash or Silverlight that are guaranteeded to work the same whatever they're plugged into. Yes these are "proprietary" but so are your OS and drivers if you run Windows or MacOSX, so is the design of your CPU and GPU, etc.
Better having working platforms which empower a multitude of developpers to get working stuff out to the public than abstract, broken chimeras that burden developers with absurd compatibility and licensing issues.
Ponder over the original story and the paradox that the FOSSest browser out there might be actually better off loading a proprietary Flash or SL plug in than implement a "Free" HTML5 "standard"