Apple to Face Antitrust Inquiry Over Cross Compiler Ban?

The Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission are in negotiations over which of the watchdogs will begin an antitrust inquiry into Apple ban of cross compilers, according to the NY Post. Apple recently updated section 3.3.1 of the iPhone Developer Agreement to forbid applications that were created using anything but Objective-C, C, or C++, forcing developers to use only their tools.

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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).
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Regulators, this person said, are days away from making a decision about which agency will launch the inquiry. It will focus on whether the policy, which took effect last month, kills competition by forcing programmers to choose between developing apps that can run only on Apple gizmos or come up with apps that are platform neutral, and can be used on a variety of operating systems, such as those from rivals Google, Microsoft and Research In Motion.


The cross compiler ban most directly affects Adobe who had built a feature into Flash CS5 to export to iPhone app.

Perhaps Apple got wind of this prompting Steve Jobs' to pen his "Thoughts on Flash".

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