Perhaps, though the disconnect here is that open source fanboys pretty much dislike H.264 as much as flash. Neither is open source by OSI standards: http://www.opensource.org/docs/osd. All the screaming about running from flash seems kind of silly when you point to something like H.264 as the alternative.

It is a standard, but that means little with all of the royalty-bearing patents surrounding it. It is royalty-free in a limited use case, but still can't be included on your typical linux distribution legally.

Not that I think Google is being altruistic. They obviously have a vested interest in controlling the video format youtube uses. Now is the time to bring a new format to the table, too. Gives them some breathing space to fight it out before worrying about paying royalties for H.264 or its successor.

I'll happily deal with a couple more years of flash (and honestly, we were going to anyway, ie9 isn't going to sweep away 7 & 8 anytime soon) to get WebM as a standard instead of H.264.