Director of Firefox fires opening salvo at Apple's tyrannical Mac App Store

Filed under: Apple, MozillaDirector of Firefox fires opening salvo at Apple's tyrannical Mac App Storeby Sebastian Anthony (RSS feed) Oct 20th 2010 at 6:06PM
Mike Beltzner, Mozilla big-wig and Director of Firefox, has just tweeted his rather damning appraisal of the new Mac App Store. In the tweet he points to the Mac App Store Review Guidelines -- and boy are they draconian, even by Apple's cultish masonic standards.
Basically, you can forget about downloading any kind of demo or beta from the Mac App Store. If an app even exhibits a bug, it will be rejected -- does Apple know how many apps, open-source or otherwise, have bugs?
If you thought that was bad enough, the guidelines continue in a similar, it's-our-sandpit! vein: apps that require optional installations (such as Java) will be rejected; apps that require root privileges will be rejected; apps that require license keys or implement their own copy project will be rejected... and so on.
The strict, chaste censorship rules made popular with the iOS App Store are also present -- there won't be any pornographic or violent apps on the Mac App Store, I'm afraid.
Finally, it's fun to compare the startling differences between Mozilla's recently-announced Open Web Apps initiative and Apple's new offering. I know: open isn't everything, and Apple's vice-like control of the user experience is impressive -- but at this rate the Mac is fast becoming a 21st century re-imagining of 20th century AOL. "Don't try to peek over the wall -- this is all the Internet you need!"



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