Charges are the only possible outcome from publishing this story, and his lawyer's efforts at using "Journalist" as a defense are an absurd stretch. The "for the sake of public interest" theme certainly won't mitigate the fact that Gizmodo staff knowingly purchased property from an individual who clearly did not own the property. While I'm no fan of Apple lately, and it certainly was an interesting story, common sense should have prevailed. I guess the carrot was too big and donkey too greedy.

Too bad. The 'ethical' choice might have earned them a place at the feet of Jobs, rather than under his heel.

Applebashing? I own a 1yr old MacBook Pro*, a new iMac and an iPhone, buddy.

A rational person can be an Apple user *and* be critical of the company's policies when he/she doesn't agree with them. I think the latest controversies (no Flash, restrictive dev platform requirements) are insulting, self-serving and isolationist, and so I reserve the right to be both an Apple user and snide/sarcastic when they offer with one hand and take away with the other.

If you want to blindly line up at the iTrough and lap up everything they pour into it, that's your decision.

*qualification: lately the MacBook does spend more time running Windows 7 then OSX.

Ding ... under two minutes for somebody (actually two sombody's) not to recognize sarcasm on /. ... *even* with the preceding "Should Adobe sue Apple" article.

I weep for today's youth.

The Daring Fireball article is obtuse and decidedly one-sided; you know how the cards are going to fall before they've even left the dealer's hand.

First, I suspect that this is only creating a pattern of diminishing returns. A smaller developer base will produce a smaller field of applications, attracting a smaller audience (...and repeat...)

Second, if you have a choice of becoming proficient on a specific subset of tools that can only be used to target a specific audience, you better hope that there are many riches to be found in your narrow niche. That is not true of the Apple store, where Chinese copy-cat apps and most favored nation statutes and poor delivery system (I never seen such a feature-poor store in my life) make extremely difficult to make a profit, never mind the fact that you first have to get over the opaque and unfathomable Apple App Approval process.

Third, programming towards a platform that is defined by such questionable ethics and so unquestionable self-serving (if you believe it is about quality you are fooling yourself ... this is about control and profit) should be considered as an ethical question as well as financial. That's un-American, I realize, but then I'm not American.

Best solution for Adobe: indefinitely delay CS5 for the Mac. Release it when Jobs is dead and is isolationist philosophy is gone with him. To be real jerks, Adobe could include a $100.00 credit towards the purchase of Windows 7 for their Mac users.

A lot of what you've said reveals how out of context this war has become. Taught them to kill? Where did that come from? Just like the guys in the gunships, you see targets where they don't exist. Did *you* see RPG's in the hands of the kids? No, but you are comforted/justified by the delusion that they could have one, or that they've been trained to kill you.

Put this scene in the parking lot of your local WalMart, and make those kids your own. That is the context that should be applied to *every* 'permission to fire' incident, but because of the "better them than us" mentality they are reduced to meaningless pixels in a reticle. If you aren't *really* trying to win the hearts and minds of the people, then the whole effort is a farce and you might as well pack up and go home.

How did you go from A to R to 7 and get marked "insightful?" Having to read a vapid and unrelated conclusion based upon a fractional slice of pseudo-logic (flash sucks = web-based technology sucks) is much more likely to make people miserable than anything you seem to have concluded. Is your argument that desktop-based applications never do this? Is your example put forth as "all web technology is bloat, for example Flash ... "

Most web-based technologies run the bulk of their processing server-side, with only the rendering on the client side. For that reason alone non-client side web applications (i.e. non-Flash/Java based) are going to be *way* more resource friendly for the client.

You want a multi-platform app ... your friggin' looking at one!!!! You want a rich application experience? Learn jQuery, YUI/etc. and (on the latest browsers) you'll have minimal bloat.

Get with the program, Grandpa (< an inference, not a logical deduction).

Yes, your comment is correct, but irrelevant to the argument (which essentially is "Apple is being a complete dick about the way they treat developers, and we want it changed").

What I can't understand is the number of developers who buy into what amounts to spec work (build it for free against our hidden 'today' strategy, know that we'll nuke it if it fails our 'tomorrow' strategy). This is something professionals typically ignore.

Adobe tried instituting something similar with mobile phones a few years ago and it failed utterly. I assume Apple has found some success in finding developers because the platform is 'cool' and 'hip' and there is a certain allure to building an iPhone app just for the sake of it.

I get that they want quality control and a hold on security, but for me the iPhone vendor lock and app store developer agreement killed a lot of what made Apple special as a company.

Ironically, one of the best post-iPad launch suggestions I ever heard is that Apple should have taken the Air and simply added a dual-screen lid, the outside being your "iPad" ... that way you keep the laptop goodness and full-on OS without losing portability. If you added a stylus to the mix (still the biggest iPad deal breaker for me ... finger-smeared drawings are a little archaic) this would be a *huge* win in my book.

Hell, you could experiment with a rotator-hinge or backflip-hinge and have one side eInk and the other backlit, giving wins in all categories ... except complexity and possibly weight.

Wow ... Jobs is sliding from Hero to Zero; tantrums and school-boy ethics aren't going to win him support in any community.

Next up: pop-ups in Safari that chastise you for being 'un-Apple' when you search via Google.

I'm not sure who you are calling the middle men ... the publisher? Isn't Amazon/Apple just the new conjoined distributor/marketer/wholesaler middle man?

With this new model many authors are going to miss the work of the middle men. For instance, the first big sell is from book rep. to bookstore purchaser. I used to buy books for an independent bookshop and let me tell you, for anything that wasn't Oprah-popular, we were the gatekeepers as to quantity and shelf space. Without the hard sell of the book rep it would be "two/next" and a they'd be a spine amidst many other spines. And let me tell you, authoring is not music writing ... you don't have the luxury of having only 1 out of 15 being a commercial success in order to pay the bills.

What I'm hoping for is actually a huge increase in the number of publisher "middle men", and growth of the smaller independents. They now have the tools to compete where once distribution power was reserved for the kings. And authors still need somebody out there hawking and flogging ... they're mostly too eclectic a crowd to do it themselves.