m234

Well, you're on the best way of becoming a "free software zealot". See, free software zealots by and large are what they are because they invested a ton of time and effort in some platform only to have that destroyed by a stupid or greedy management decision.

You really think developing software in 25 year old technologies (Objective-C, Cocoa) is fun???

Programming isn't a game for many people, it's a profession. The time you spend on learning their platform and languages are sunk costs, and you need to recoup them through money-making products. By restricting developers to their APIs and languages, they are trying to lock in developers and users.

Apple is trying to accomplish the same kind of lock-in that Microsoft managed with Windows. And we better nip this thing in the bud, because Apple would screw us even worse than Microsoft has.

"They've spent the money and the time to create a great platform."

They've spent some money and time, and they have taken a lot of other people's work: Mach, gcc, Smalltalk, BSD, etc.

"they dont have a monopoly in the market"

That's not so clear to me. I own an iPhone and an iPad even though I think they really suck technically. But there is content available for them that simply is not available for other platforms.