Gatekeeper is not nearly as bad for small developers, though. Unless Microsoft has started offering, as part of a $99 MSDN subscription, the ability to generate a signed certificate that doesn't expire for five years automatically from inside Visual Studio as soon as you've signed in with your Microsoft ID.
The problem with Microsoft's strategy has always been the reliance on companies like VeriSign for whom recurring revenue from certificate renewal is a primary revenue source. And when I've had to deal with VeriSign for code-signing certificates in the past, it's easily cost more than $99 in time ("I'm sorry for the delay, but could you please fax that to us again, only this time, on official company letterhead?").
Verisign is a massive scam. Their SSL certs, for example are several hundred dollars. They get away with it because the big corporate-types have "heard" of verisign and "heard" they need security.
Last I checked, you didn't even need the $99 Mac Developer program to get a signing certificate. You just needed an Apple Developer Id. The $99 program allows you to submit apps to the app store and gives you access to pre-release binaries, etc.
Even better — I was already a member of the paid program when Mountain Lion was announced, and this point wasn't clear from the original announcement.
Even more significant: as a registered developer, it took me less than ten minutes on developer.apple.com to obtain a Developer ID, to use it to successfully sign an executable and an installer package, and to verify the resulting signatures.
In contrast, as an MSDN Universal member, Microsoft directs me to a list of root certificates installed in current versions of Windows [1], leaving me to puzzle out which are willing and able to sign third-party code-signing certificates (as, presumably, organizations like the French Secrétariat Général de la Défense Nationale are not).
As an aside, the official copy of this list is posted on TechNet as an unlocked wiki page I'm permitted to edit!?!
I keep hearing that all I need is a developer ID to get a signing certificate, but nowhere on the developer website for Apple do I see where I can get this certificate without first forking over $99 for the mac Developer Program...
I was under that impression as well--perhaps something has changed since the initial announcement--but certificates are not free. I just went through this process with my free, non-App-Store Mac app, and there was no way to do it without paying $99.
The problem with Microsoft's strategy has always been the reliance on companies like VeriSign for whom recurring revenue from certificate renewal is a primary revenue source. And when I've had to deal with VeriSign for code-signing certificates in the past, it's easily cost more than $99 in time ("I'm sorry for the delay, but could you please fax that to us again, only this time, on official company letterhead?").