UPDATE: While I personally think that Apple has fast become the embodiment of closed. I respect CEOs who take risks. Plenty of CEOs (in fact all the ones I know) would never even think of insulting a past present or future vendor partner. For each CEO I Respect I can think of a moment that they were dead wrong.

Bill Gates said Linux would never be secure because people working for free in their spare time don't do good work. Then came the age where the would could not operate without the security that Linux provides.

Michael Dell once held a press conference where he said "people are going to access the internet on their phones? This little screen? Never."

Steve Jobs said that bloggers were a fad and that they would never be respected the way journalists are. Soon after that, we entered the era of The Huffington Post, Perez Hilton and blogs on almost every site.

I'm accustomed to seeing the big personalities have their dooseys over time. That said, I've never seen this and don't know what to do with it: Monitoring Adobe's Development of the Flash Compiler for iPhone, waiting for them to have spent time and money on getting it to work and work well, then switching the SDK license just before launch costing them time, energy, money and face with the industry. It is demoralizing and asinine at best and shouldn't make any company who depends on Apple's API's feel safe.

It is irresponsible of any API provider not to proactively inform a developer that they would never approve what they were building. It is the antithesis of the 3rd party API experience to have spent millions on a project and be informed by TOS update days before launch that everything you have worked on with your team is never going to reach the market. On top of that, they knew, and deliberately waited for it to be as expensive as possible.

That was not cool. The fiduciary responsibility of an executive or director is to maximize the return on investment for the shareholder by competition for the consumer and the consumer must be allowed to choose the winners. If that behavior is allowed to stand then all we have worked for in Web 2.0 is greatly diminished by the precedent. That you can bait and switch a developer into huge losses by manipulating your TOS.

Apple seems to think it is ok to offer an API, lure as many companies as possible to develop for it, keep one specific developer at arms length until they have spent a fortune, then deny that team their launch, and toss their project in the boneyard. The material efficiency of the entire industry drops when money is wasted. Everyone suffers. A simple email when they knew would have saved heartache and capital loss. This is no way to compete for market share and it undermines Apple's credibility in ways more costly than letting Adobe make slow apps. The developers don't hold press conferences and will never tell Apple that was evil. They will bide their time and hedge their bets.

My own opinion aside, I received an email from the CEO of Appcelerator which, like Phone Gap's assertions from a few weeks ago, explains that they are not the target of 3.3.1 and claims that they will be an exception because they claim to be better developers than Adobe and have more attention to detail.

It's a dark time in the valley when emails like this have to be written. The spirit of the iPhone platform is shifting from announcements like "Great news! Look how cool we are!" to "Great News! We probably won't be in the carnage you just saw!"

Here's the message in it's entirety:

Sid Gabriel:

I wanted to provide everyone an update on the issues related to the iPhone 4.0 Terms of Service. While we have yet to receive any formal word from Apple as it relates to Titanium, this morning, Steve Jobs posted some thoughts on why Apple is banning Flash on the iPhone/iPad. The focus of the article is on making two important arguments: how to ensure a high-quality iPhone experience and the importance of using open technologies. Based on his piece, we have a few followup points as this news relates to Appcelerator Titanium.

- If there was any doubt, Apple's specific target is Adobe Flash.

- At the crux of every one of Jobs' points is a single overriding theme: ensuring application quality. More specifically, Apple wants to make sure that applications written for the iPhone/iPad are developed using all the great features in the iPhone SDK and that they should not be developed using a lowest common denominator approach. We couldn't agree more. Split views, popovers, cover flow views, native table views, native maps, native tab bars… There are over 2,000 methods and properties available to Titanium developers to customize their applications with almost every native Apple UI or feature imaginable. And if something isn't in there that you need, it's easy to extend the platform by building a native Titanium module. This extensible, native architecture is probably the reason you chose Titanium in the first place. One of the most common statements we hear about Titanium is: "You built *that app* in Javascript. Wow!".

- As it relates to adoption of new iPhone capabilities, we rev our product very quickly. In fact, next week, we'll introduce support for iPhone 4.0 application development with Titanium 1.3.0. And we'll continue to add new APIs as Apple finalizes the 4.0 OS. This has always been the case with our stance on updates to the underlying operating systems that we support. In all cases, we are working with Apple APIs under NDA before they're finally available to the public and we'll continue to do that as normal.

- Apple has a clear preference for open technologies, specifically HTML5, CSS, and Javascript. Here too, we are in alignment. Titanium developers code in Javascript as executed by the Webkit engine (eg: the kind that Apple prefers in its ToS), and web content can easily be displayed using HTML5 and CSS through a web view. We're big supporters in these technologies and ourselves have contributed to WebKit (Martin Robinson, one of our desktop engineers, is a WebKit committer).

- We've had over 50 applications approved for the App Store over the past 3 weeks under the new terms (which every developer now needs to agree to). Not a single one has been rejected for being built on Titanium. We even updated our own test app, Snapost, after accepting the new terms.

In summary, Apple is targeting Flash (mission accomplished) and Apple wants to push their platform forward by having only high-quality, native applications in the App Store. We couldn't agree more. Native application development with open technologies is in our DNA and our continued vision for Appcelerator.

Sincerely,
Jeff Haynie
CEO

4.1 Million invested in Appcelerator may evaporate if it is no longer able to publish iPhone Apps
http://www.crunchbase.com/company/appcelerator

This was an investment of Larry Augustin and Storm Venttures
http://www.crunchbase.com/person/larry-augustin
http://www.crunchbase.com/financial-organization/storm-ventures

This effects it's Principals: Ben Choi among others.
http://www.crunchbase.com/person/ben-choi

This in turn weakens the strategic positioning of Book Renter and Mobile Iron
http://www.crunchbase.com/company/bookrenter-com
http://www.crunchbase.com/company/mobileiron