Why should we criticize them for making weapons components or for owning Disney? That has nothing to do with their products.
You can agree or not with those arguments, I'm not advocating for or against them. They don't affect my purchasing decisions (the best tool for the job in my current circumstances is a MacBook Pro so that's what I have). I make my living working for banks that no doubt finance far worse things. If Disney returns to form animation-wise I'll reward them with movie ticket purchases. It just seems to me that all the people posting "Apple is finally evil" linkbait nonsense could choose meatier targets than mistakes in developer relations, and the fact they choose not to means they're not even any good at being wrong.
It's crappy linkbait blog post pollution that irritates me, not anything that Apple's doing.
It really does pay to inform yourself before ranting. Worst case, you spent some time but your argument becomes more clear. Best case, you prevent yourself saying something uninformed and untrue.
In this case, yes, Apple tried to close the military product line, and the US military strongly insisted that PA Semi continue producing their existing military products.
What I mean is - you would think that the kind of people who write shrill blog posts about the iPhone SDK would be at least as incensed by these two points, and it's interesting that they have not emerged as anti-Apple memes in general, regardless of their validity.
I'd have expected to see more 'OMG steve jobs makes the brains for cruise missiles and steals our culture with copyright extensions' stuff around. Surely those caused Apple to become 'finally evil' to these people?
The iPhone SDK issues are merely disappointing in comparison. You don't see two year old blog posts from the same group of people flaming Apple for not providing a wireless device of any kind for them to develop on, which is surely a bigger injustice by their logic. Where were these people when I wanted some apps for my RAZR?
I think the Venn diagram of people who are affected by Apple's iPhone development policies, and the group of people who complain about them on the internet has a very small intersection, and if you add the group of people who can actually code, you could probably buy the lot of them a round of drinks for twenty bucks.
Personally, as a veteran of the war of mendacity against common sense that is SOAP, I support anything that gets Dave Winer upset.