I don’t see the issue here. Pretty much every company has taken to protecting themselves against everything under the sun in their license agreements. That’s (sadly) standard practice at this point.
Beyond that there’s a legitimate need for this particular clause and that’s to prevent vendors who would market poorly written tools that create buggy applications.
So the question isn’t “does Apple have the clause” it’s “will Apple use the clause against legitimate developer tools like Adobe Flash or monotouch”. Until they do I don’t see a need for criticism.
If the apps are junk Apple could simply not approve them. There is no need to make a special case for apps written in other languages, it's quite easy to make a buggy app in C/C++/Objective-C.
Sure there is. If a cheap framework is produced and it's allowing thousands of junk apps to be turned out by spammers or whoever it in Apple's best interest to reserve the right to ban the framework itself. Rather than dedicate a fairly highly paid technical person to reviewing each junk app.
Do you mean cheap as in "not made by Apple", cheap as in "I cant think of a meaningful adjective but I want something negative" or cheap as in "costs nothing, same as the tool used to code Obj-C"? And let's hope these mysterious spammers don't learn how to use Obj-C. And you need to pay money to have the right to submit apps, right? They can pay the highly paid technical whatever out of that.
MonoTouch, CS5 and Unity are commercial tools that, you know, cost money and are not cheap.
Why would a developer or a company invest money and time in those tools, only to give the iTunes approval process yet another reason for rejecting his app?
It kills these businesses, even if Apple might decide to look the other way in the approval process.
I was also starting to wonder when I'm going to see apologetic views on this, as is customary for anything Apple does :)
I don't buy this. First, the precedent will be set fairly quickly. If Apple does start banning all Unity or MonoTouch apps I GUARANTEE we'll hear about it days after it starts to happen (as we have with every other app). So unless Apple is actually going to kill of these frameworks it's not an issue.
Second, if you're a hobbyist you aren't going to buy a $2,000 framework and if you're a business $2,000 isn't that much for a software lic. I don't see the cost being prohibitive here unless, as I said above, Apple makes it clear they will ban these frameworks (at which point it's all moot anyway)
Unity has a free version and you can first develop with it, then buy a license. Productivity is more valuable than the license price, and Unity is a productive framework.
The price for MonoTouch is something like $399 for a single developer ... which is really not that much considering that you already paid for over-priced hardware.
All of them provide an easier path to developing for the iPhone when you're not used to ObjC / Cocoa and all of them enable shared business logic if you want to go multi-platform.
Apple already makes it clear they want to ban these framework. It's like a bank that has the right to take your house (according to the contract you agreed to) but it may take some time before it does it ... if it's in the contract and you don't do anything about it, then it's only a question of time. That's how things work ;)
Beyond that there’s a legitimate need for this particular clause and that’s to prevent vendors who would market poorly written tools that create buggy applications.
So the question isn’t “does Apple have the clause” it’s “will Apple use the clause against legitimate developer tools like Adobe Flash or monotouch”. Until they do I don’t see a need for criticism.