Apple 'bans' Firefox, Word, more
March 7th 2008
Mozilla Blog (Rob Sayre) quotes some of the terms of Apple's iPhone SDK Agreement and what's said is sure spark the ire of many developers:
No interpreted code may be downloaded and used in an Application except for code that is interpreted and run by Apple's Published APIs and builtin interpreter(s)... An Application may not itself install or launch other executable code by any means, including without limitation through the use of a plug-in architecture, calling other frameworks, other APIs or otherwise.
According to Sayre, the practical effect of Apple's wording is to ban Firefox, SpiderMonkey, Lisp, Lua, Ruby, Python, Rhino, Java, Opera, .NET, Squeak, Quake, Unreal, Second Life, GCC, GDB, GNOME, KDE, Photoshop, Word, Excel, Flash, Freetype and Zork.
More than one article commentator has taken Sayre to task for his interpretation and language. "Sensationalism" puts it this way:
did you ever really believe apple would "allow" some of those? gnome, kde? really? ... really? i wish my openmoko device would "allow" me to run os x or windows and did you believe that adding more overhead to the os (lisp, lua, ruby, python, java, etc) would be something apple would do? .net? come on.
Apple has said from the beginning that iPhone platform stability is one of their primary concerns and that means making choices. How those choices play out and, quite naturally, change over time are things that are important to me.
Moreover, given the early state of the iPhone, it's more than a bit arrogant to fault Apple for not being everything to everyone (ie perfect)...
What's your take?
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