I am frankly wondering if this man believed in any of the things he was saying, or if he was being purely cynical.

The proposition in this article is extremely simple. Adobe Flash would have compromised the end-user experience on iOS devices, so it wasn't allowed into the walled garden. All the lip service he is paying to open source here reeks of PR bullshit. They are perhaps the worst offender, and the furthest removed from the idea of an "open web", of all the silicon valley companies.

Pretending that WebKit was an open source project born at Apple, for the sake of contributing to the open web or whatever, is straight up trashy. Besides this failure to attribute, one could argue that Apple needed to comply with the LGPL when they forked KHTML and KJS. I see no reason to believe that a fully original browser engine born at Apple would be open source.