[catweasel]

Faustian bargain? Assholes? Evil? .. really, if this is the most serious accusation of "evil" one can level at Apple then it isn't really going to affect my buying decisions. It's not like they're dealing in small arms or manufacturing cluster bombs. If you step back and think about it all Apple is doing is stuffing up their own app store, which can be classified as monumentally stupid and short sighted but not really "evil".

[catweasel]

General Electric, now there's a company that's "evil". http://www.google.com/search?q=%22general+electric%22+%2Bevi...

Do you see my point? To anybody outside the app development community it's going to look a little bit "self important" for developers to be using such strong language and talking of boycotts over something most folks would agree is not evil. I agree what Apple is doing is stupid, in the long term the app store is going to be polluted with crappy apps and they're approval backlog is going to be rather daunting. I think strong lobbying from the development community is in order, but it takes conscious and deliberate inhumanity for me to label someone "evil".

[astine]

Yeah, but it's Paul's point that it's the developer's opinions that matter, hyperbole or not. Microsoft didn't get into the business of operating systems until Apple kicked them off of theirs. If Apple makes it too hard for developers to write software for them, developers will go to the next best thing, even if it's DOS.

[gcheong]

There is more than one definition of "evil" - in one case it means "harmful or injurious" and this is what I think most people mean when they say Apple is "evil", not that they really think there are people inside of Apple thinking about how they can deliberately screw developers over in some amoral way. Apple is definitely acting by this form of "evil" towards developers by harming their ability to serve the customer, and because developers feel unjustly harmed, developers feel they are justified in using this strong language.

[antirez]

Sorry but I believe in a religious way that an hardware vendor should not have the power to enforce what software can run into a device. Like a bike vendor can't force you to only use your bike in a limited number of streets.

[clawrencewenham]

That metaphor is wrong. It isn't illegal to jailbreak an iPhone, it just voids the warrantee. You can run any software you like on an iPhone.

A company should have the right to control the user experience offered for a device that it designed and manufactured. That will mean denying a third party's right to bypass those controls.

The user has the right to do anything with the device once they've bought it.

[jshen]

I think it's reasonable to make such a charge if "their app store" is in effect "The App Store". This is like saying that it's not evil to remove freedom of speech in America. I mean, it's only stuffing up "their country".