I really can't see why folks are getting their knickers in a twist.
Your use of demeaning language doesn't make your opponents wrong.
wouldn't we just consider it a bone-headed move, and not the cause for moral outrage?
It's both. Legality != morality. A business practice can be perfectly legal but immoral. Of course you can say anything Apple does is moral because it's within their rights, but there are also other ways of assessing the morality of actions, e.g. weighing their consequences.
A store-owner decides he wants to put an arbitrary restriction on the types of items he sells in his store. Let's say, perhaps, that a grocery store decides to stock only Organic produce.
That's not a good analogy. Those selling non-organic produce have plenty of other places to take their goods. They are commodities.
Anyone who has invested in a language layer technology can't do that. You can't take your Flash -> Objective-C compiler and sell it anywhere else. Apple just forced you to lose all of your investment for no good reason.
It's like offering communal grazing areas. A bunch of ranchers decide to move their cattle down to your area because it makes economic sense at the time. Once they arrive, you put up a fence and say fuck you. Now they spent their time and money moving down there, and have nothing to show for it. Sure you didn't have a contract but they have real material losses due to the changes in basically, the TOS on your grazing land. Catlle might die, ranchers might not be able to afford moving them back and go out of business. The same applies with Apple. I would hate to be a startup in this space right now.
But Apple never offered a "communal grazing area". The iPhone has been a closed platform from day one, and everybody developing for the iPhone already had a metric buttload of restrictions on them.
If the ranchers decided to move their cattle to an area in the hopes that they might find communal grazing available, well, they took a risk, and lost. That's business.
Sellers of non-organic produce have plenty of other places to take their goods, and developers of applications for mobile devices/smartphones have plenty of other devices they can develop for.
You still haven't grasped that you are comparing commodities to non-commodities. If you just invested a bunch of time into a source to source translator for the iPhone, you can't just take that somewhere else. It is entirely useless elsewhere. Of course Apple doesn't HAVE to accommodate these people, but it is an egregious move for both developers and the users. I don't actually see what the gain is for Apple from this other than slighting Adobe.
You appear to be arguing that we shouldn't complain that Apple's closed platform is obnoxious, or hate Steve Jobs for being an anti-programmer jerk, or encourage people to avoid Apple. Nobody said that some existing legal or moral authority should force Apple to treat us nice.
It's proportional to market share. I think we both agree that such a move would be immoral for a monopolist (making developers stupid... stifling progress... blah blah). Assume it causes X amount of moral harm. Then someone with 50% market share would cause X/2 moral harm by the exact same mechanisms. 1% market share, X/100 moral harm. Think of it as voting for Hitler: less evil than being Hitler, but still evil.
Your use of demeaning language doesn't make your opponents wrong.
wouldn't we just consider it a bone-headed move, and not the cause for moral outrage?
It's both. Legality != morality. A business practice can be perfectly legal but immoral. Of course you can say anything Apple does is moral because it's within their rights, but there are also other ways of assessing the morality of actions, e.g. weighing their consequences.