Agreed, I feel like by building things like this it just hampers all the work that is being built to replace flash. The best way to change things is to make it so that learning HTML5 and JavaScript becomes worth it, and that is easily done by just not supporting flash.
I think this is aimed at legacy support, I don't think anyone would target this as a supported runtime.
Ironically most of the useful flash applications/games etc wouldn't run on these runtimes as they are using features not supported in HTML5. This sort of thing works best for crappy adverts and banners, which no one really wants anyway. This is highlighted by the fact the big competitor (Gordon?) is developed by the Google ad sense team ;)
However there are other things, like webcam/device support, some audio stuff, filters that may be very slow on a canvas and hard to run in WebGL inside other panes (overlays etc).
I'm glad DRM isn't globally accepted by the W3C Consortium, but I'm sure beneficiaries like Google, Adobe and Microsoft heavily try to subvert that state.
But Flash DRM is, like all DRM in the face of a hostile end-user, ineffective. Nobody has any problems using the plethora of tools that strip DRM from Flash video, right?
I expect there will be a new lib to replace that, I guess this would bridge the gap for those who don't update. I doubt ming would target this runtime though, would be very inefficient.
