This is one of Zeds weaker rants. He wants to piss of the Ruby community, yet it is far too obviously filled with bait. Time will show if the fish bites, however.
What is really going on is a war fought by proxy on the iPhone. The combatants are Adobe wanting to commoditize all platforms for their flash apps and Apple, who wants to keep the control of their platform. Ruby, Lisp (any), Haskell, Python, and Lua are not participants in the war, yet they got hit by the nuclear fallout.
The interesting question is how much Apple needs to do to piss off developers - which they need in their eco-system. While other platforms lags somewhat behind the iPhone, there is no doubt that the scales can tip quickly. I may be wrong, but I think rather few programmers make their pay from iPhone revenue streams.
Ruby, Lisp (any), Haskell, Python, and Lua are not participants in the war, yet they got hit by the nuclear fallout.
This is a great analogy. The people that were vaporized by the atomic bombs probably didn't care enough about the cause they died for to die for it. But they didn't get to choose -- someone else chose for them.
It is a legislative defensive move by Apple. I hardly doubt they would go after a highly successful and well-written Ruby application. Rather they want a way to pull everything flash at a whims notice with reference to the agreement. In other words, they set up a trap.
What is really going on is a war fought by proxy on the iPhone. The combatants are Adobe wanting to commoditize all platforms for their flash apps and Apple, who wants to keep the control of their platform. Ruby, Lisp (any), Haskell, Python, and Lua are not participants in the war, yet they got hit by the nuclear fallout.
The interesting question is how much Apple needs to do to piss off developers - which they need in their eco-system. While other platforms lags somewhat behind the iPhone, there is no doubt that the scales can tip quickly. I may be wrong, but I think rather few programmers make their pay from iPhone revenue streams.