Apple has pursued a single consistent goal under the reign of King Jobs II: protect the ecosystem, and grow it in careful, measured increments. In order to kee

Apple has pursued a single consistent goal under the reign of King Jobs II: protect the ecosystem, and grow it in careful, measured increments. In order to keep something great from turning to crap, you have to have a gatekeeper. If you don't trust the gatekeeper, that's OK. But I'm hearing a lot of noise from developers who are already beholden to their own gatekeepers (whether it's the core team of your open source project, Microsoft, Oracle/Sun, or whoever). I mean, Adobe?! Could there be a more arbitrary and horrible gatekeeper than Adobe?! Just because Apple doesn't do what you want doesn't make them better or worse than any maintainer of any "good thing". In the end, it all boils down to whether you trust Apple to do the right thing. If you don't, then you're welcome to go punt on the umpteen device platforms that are currently vapor. (How many years have we been hearing about "iPod killers", and where are we with that?) It's OK to complain, but I really would have thought the HN audience would understand that EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE is a trade-off. Yes, we should be debating the rules that Apple imposes, because we have a say in that. No, that doesn't validate rhetoric about Apple being "evil" or "anti-developer" etc.