Apple tightens control over development...again.

Take a look at this: Before today, the Apple License Agreement for apps read like this:

3.3.1 — Applications may only use Documented APIs in the manner prescribed by Apple and must not use or call any private APIs.

As of today, it looks like this:

3.3.1 — Applications may only use Documented APIs in the manner prescribed by Apple and must not use or call any private APIs. Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine, and only code written in C, C++, and Objective-C may compile and directly link against the Documented APIs (e.g., Applications that link to Documented APIs through an intermediary translation or compatibility layer or tool are prohibited).

Now, I don't think this necessarily means the Flash CS5 is torched (if you didn't know Flash CS5 has the ability to compile ActionScript apps to run on iPhone). The only thing it MUST do is, it must appear to the external eye that the app was written in C (objective, C++, etc.). If there is a compiled binary that speaks to the iPhone API through an intermediary layer, it's out of license.

Whatever the case, this is going too far. Not only does Apple want to specify how you can distribute your apps, they want to tell you exactly how to write and compile them. I'm reasonably confident this won't stop Adobe, as they wouldn't have gone this far without understanding Apple's probable reaction to their iPhone compiling tools, but it will certainly torch a number of efforts underway to get iPhone dev into general development, like Java, etc; I know for sure the .Net->to->iPhone effort is now out of license, as it uses an intermediary layer (or did anyway).

C'mon Apple. You've got your distro lock, for pete's sake if home engineers can come up with another way to put it on wax, and it passes your already existing restrictions, back the hell off.