1. Imagine Microsoft forcing windows users to subscribe to MSN in order to connect to the internet. Imagine Microsoft forcing their users to purchase all software through microsoft.com. Imagine if windows only ran on official Microsoft hardware? Would this strategy have been effective? Is this kind of practice sustainable?

2. Imagine the Apple/AT&T board room conference call where they debated how much was too much to carve out of developers revenues. They finally arrived at 30 percent. As one involved with software sales, this number is very high for a reseller, and ridiculously high considering the exclusivity Apple demands.

3. Know the difference between prize financing and venture capital. Prize capital allows the winner to retain 100% of the company, while venture capital is giving your equity away in exchange for cash. You will find that most venture capitalists will be seeking a controlling stake of your company (>50%), and will be looking to get acquired, go public, or liquidate their interest within 3-5 years. Furthermore, 100 million is a drop in the pool of total VC fund money out there looking to invest in this space, and nothing will stop you from getting your android project funded that way. This makes the" iFund" announcement about as significant as breaking news about the omnipresence of DiHydrogen monoxide in the environment.

4. So after this you still want to be an iPhone/iFund developer. Let's do a little "new math". So after Apple takes 30% of your revenue, the VCs take 51% of your company, you are left with 19% of what you started with. Invalid equations aside... the moral of the story is that if you choose to go this route, you will be, so to say "Owned". Look how happy musicians are about the pennies on the dollar they get for their sales on the ITunes music store... Should we not be itching to join their ranks?

5. What about free software? If only official apple-authorize software sold through the apple software store is allowed to be installed on your device, then there leaves no room whatsoever for Free/Open Source software to exist on Apple's platform. Sorry GNUbies!

6. What if Apple/AT&T doesn't want you to erode the sales of their content streaming services? They just stamp your software as "Bandwidth hogging", and tell you to politely go fuck yourself (and this means you slingMedia!). You have now officially become a victim of the absence of openness and network neutrality. They probably don't even offer a refund on the $99 you wasted buying their SDK.

It's time to seriously ask yourself, Are you, as a developer, willing to subjugate yourself in such a way?