I was not necessarily saying the clients would be open-source or free, just that it was not necessarily in the interests of the client developers to pass along

I was not necessarily saying the clients would be open-source or free, just that it was not necessarily in the interests of the client developers to pass along the ads. I use a paid twitter client on my iPhone and if they pass along ads I will bolt for one that does not do so -- I paid the app developer to serve my interests and not the interests of twitter management. For the developers of paid clients I can't think of a single reason they would go along with twitter on this issue and a lot of reasons why they would make more money (by gaining users) if they filtered the ads. In fact, for the iPhone I can see "get rid of these #$&* ads" being one of the most popular in-app upsells for free twitter clients.