[Openmcl-devel] Mac App store: will CCL apps fly?

[Sudhir Shenoy]

On Oct 23, 2010, at 2:58 AM, Ron Garret wrote:

> Exactly.  The simple fact of the matter is that Apple does not care about its developers.  It has never cared about its developers.  It doesn't need to.  It cares about its retail customers.  It serves the needs of its retail customers.  By doing that it creates a market in which enough developers are willing to put up with Apple's shit to produce more than enough product to keep the app store well stocked.

I think this is really unfair to Apple. For years, they've been providing a nice development environment for the Mac (Xcode etc.) along with a wide variety of programming languages (including Java, Python, Perl, Ruby etc.) installed with the developer tools. This was all done at no cost so hobbyists like me could continue to write code with no commercial objectives in mind ...

Of course, there have been some changes of late e.g., charging $100 per year for iOS devs and deprecating their JVM a few days ago so the old philosophy is in the process of modification. I think this is driven purely by financial considerations, though, rather than out of a desire to screw an inferior race of developers (which is what your comment implies).

As opposed to the i-devices, the Mac still retains the capacity to install programs from any source whatsoever so I don't see what the problem is. Everyone is assuming that people will not buy applications that are not in the Mac App store. But is this really true?

My $0.02
Sudhir