Wired has a story today on Apple's removal of the Scratch app. A year ago when I was telling my Mac friends that the App Store approval chokepoint for the iPhone platform was pure evil and that I wished Apple every conceivable bit of grief for anointing itself censor in chief, I could not have imagined a more perfect example.
The developer terms and conditions are just fine for approval into Apple's App Store, provided that they don't limit end-users' ability to install what they want. But they do, because end-users have no such ability, short of jailbreaking their iPhones, voiding the warranty and violating the terms they agreed to.
There's no reason for most of the restrictive end-user and developer terms in their respective contracts, other than to guarantee Apple unnatural secondary revenue streams over which it has absolute control. But hey, 12.9 million of you out there signed up to work for Apple last quarter. And I'll plead guilty too. Before they started acting belligerently with the rights they had reserved, I signed up for two of the damned things. My Mom still loves hers and my grandmother would like nothing more than to get mine as a hand-me-down.
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-Brad.