<p><pre><code> I actually predict that this will be a major problem for Apple in the
future, but probably won't impact their bottom line for their mobile
platforms. Programmers never forget things. They are notorious for
not updating basic knowledge they believe and for spreading myths
and rumors about technology for decades. I can actually see a situation
building where programmers who maybe wouldn't have worked on an
iPhone application would still avoid targeting Apple products simply
because of the stories about Apple doing "A Section 331" on them.
</code></pre>
This.<p>Despite my personally benefitting from the new policy change, (I write Obj-C comfortably and will benefit from the reduced competition,) I think Apple is making a grave mistake trying to extend their review checking process in a manner that can only be done in reality by visiting each and every developer. I'm not convinced Apple's in-house analysis tools will be able to capture violations in a manner consistent with their current license wording.<p>It's just going to degenerate into a cat-and-mouse game with the larger and/or more tenacious middleware developers, leading Apple to waste resources and R&D money on license enforcement, driving down profits and adding significantly to the large pile of ill will Apple has accumulated in the last few years. Apple is <i>still</i> living down past quirks and excess of their platforms, like "Cult of Apple evangelism" and "one-button mice," that are no longer true, but hang around their necks like a long decaying albatross. In short, this could help cause Jobs to lose control of his platform's message to the masses if the people able to recommend their hardware and platforms keep sticking "asterisks" to their recommendations.
I can't get the taste out of my mouth about 331. To the point that this is actually making me study other platforms because of the spookiness of Apple's propensity to be arbitrary. I'm two weeks into developing a game I had hoped to port over to Android after releasing for the iPhone. Now, I'm looking harder now at WebKit and Android (and have glanced a little at Windows Phone, gasp).
Although I am amongst the first to disagree, maybe not necessarily with Apple's goal, but certainly with the language they are resorting to to achieve that goal, I have to object to the following statement:<p><i>What I believe programmers are truly angry about is that Apple broke their long standing promise of supporting multiple languages when they originally attracted them to the platform. They're really saying:<p>"You told me if I bought a mac, and an iPhone, and an iPad, that you would create LLVM and MacRuby and Python bindings so I can code in my favorite language. You lied!"</i><p>Nobody is really saying that because neither Apple nor any of their employees have ever told anyone such a thing. On one hand the ban of interpreted code, except for Javascript, has been there since day one, so no sane programmer has had the illusion that they can use Ruby, or Python, or whatever to write iPhone apps. And on the other hand there is absolutely nothing preventing Apple from amending that clause in the license agreement once the technical limitations, e.g. garbage collected Objective-C runtime, behind toll-free, ahead of time compiled wrappers like MacRuby disappear. Especially since MacRuby in particular is an Apple run project.
<i>In this case I think they could be sued or investigated the same way Microsoft was regarding their unfair business practices in licensing.</i><p>No, they can't, because the predicate for the Microsoft enforcement action was their monopoly position in the desktop market, and the cause of action was their attempt to use that monopoly to create <i>new</i> monopolies.<p>Apple has nothing close to a monopoly on smart phones (they are crushed by RIM).<p>I'm also confused by the thesis of this blog post, which seems to be that there was a bait-and-switch pulled on the Apple dev community writ large. The vast, overwhelming majority of iPhone apps are written in ObjC, and Ruby is no more a second-class citizen on OSX today as it was last year.