Circular?

They did that with Xcode 4

I am not grocking your complaint here. Apple has added support for delta software updates, so security and other releases will be much smaller. The old need for updating the whole OS is no longer a problem. What you are saying about a sharing API doesn't make any sense to me in context. I assume you are complaining about how Apple implemented twitter integration as a task specific class instead of some more general purpose tool. That might be true, I haven't used either API, but isn't really the point of my post that the OS has a lot of new functionality and that claiming iOS 5 was mainly about twitter and Facebook integration into the Photos app was wildly inaccurate. The under the hood stuff is huge.

Apple is constantly adding major updates to their application frameworks. As an example, they've moved to using their "block" APIs to allow for comparatively easy use of multiple cores without the pain of managing one's own threading. If you were an iOS developer you could look at the change log for the iOS 5 SDK headers and you would find it runs nearly 7000 lines of symbols and methods added like "Added +[NSLinguisticTagger availableTagSchemesForLanguage:]" whatever that means. Twitter integration was described in just 31 of those 7000 lines.

How would making Bill Gates move his official residence to Texas close your budget gap?

So here we have the argument that the developer isn't actually losing any sales. All of those pirated copies don't actually hurt him. And this might be nearly true, financially. Piracy in this scenario, is more a crime of insult. The pirate is telling the developer who put a good deal of who he is as a person and an engineer into a product that the developer and the product are worth nothing; and that the pirate can do as he pleases with the intellectual property of the developer.

I'm seeing a connection, if only by analogy, with the ferocity by which GPL advocates protect GPL'd software from being used for profit by closed source projects.

Let's say I used a GPL'd library in a closed sourced iPhone app. First, I would be unlikely to be caught, because I mean, who would notice? Second, I wouldn't actually be harming whomever wrote it. I'm not taking bread from their table; and unlike the case of the pirated iPhone app, the original author is very explicitly not wanting to profit from the code. But if informed of my treachery, I'm pretty sure that the author and the entire GPL community would be furious that I was using their property for commercial gain (without releasing the source). I have not done this, and would not do this, but it would be really convenient for me if the ATSC liba52 decoder was under BSD or MIT license.

In both cases, the major wrong would appear to be getting value from someone else's labor without respecting or acknowledging that person and his right to dispose of his work product as he sees fit. But I would think the case of the app piracy is worse because the enabling of piracy is causing non-zero harm to the developer in addition to the insult.

And I would think that anyone who thinks piracy is OK or a victimless crime should also promote the MIT licenses over the GPL.

I went and bought Downhill Bowling which uses the unity 3D flavor of Mono, and the launch time is reasonably peppy at launch, taking 12 seconds on my iPhone 3G to the point at which I could press a button, which is about the same for the non-Mono Madden 2010..

Well that may well be, but if you don't maintain a star rating at or above 3.5, you can pretty much forget profit. (Speaking as someone who gets absolutely massacred star-wise by the "rate on delete" method for my free app.)

The 40 games listed on the above link have an average rating of 2.6, and range from a rating of 1 star to 4 stars, which is not bad, but not particularly good either. But at least it is possible to get as high as 4 stars with Mono; I'm actually surprised by that.

• Downhill bowling 4
• Billiards 2
• Space Pig 1
• Age of Curling 3.5
• DuskTreaders 2.5
• X-Razer 2.5
• Invinciball 3
• SlidePop 2
• FuguMaze 2
• Monkey Diving 2.5
• Ball-X 3
• Fugu-Tilt 2
• Pizza Dash 2
• Debris 2
• Trash It! 2.5
• Asteroid Strike 2.5
• Crazy Snowboard 3.5
• Bubble Bang 2.5
• Bounce Pop 2.5
• FuguBall 2
• SpaceRace 2.5
• iDrone 2.5
• Mars Explorer 3.5
• Christmas Spell 3.5
• Alpha Blocks 3.5
• Cricket 2
• Rock em Blocks 3
• Pealagic Tones 3
• Average = 2.6