I believe they would be allowed to charge for the SDK and the dev tools as long as they don’t require developers to use that SDK and the dev tools. I’m sure someone else would provide an alternative SDK and tooling then.
But is it even legally required for them to provide a stable 3rd party software support? That would be ridiculous. So if they put in the effort to provide such a base and open it to public, why can't they choose to be compensated for that work?
My problem can be summarized as (assume the company in question is not a monopoly):
* Is it illegal to sell a device with a microprocessor in it that has no support for 3rd party programmability? -> no, most digital devices are like this in fact.
* Is it illegal to sell a computing device and develop software in house for it? Maybe charge for some of it? Still with no 3rd party support? -> no it is not illegal.
* Is it illegal then, to contract other developers / companies to write that "in house" software for the device you are making? -> no that is not illegal
* Is it illegal to make agreements with other companies to buy software / programming services from them to include in your device? -> no that is not illegal
* Is it illegal to make agreements with other companies so that they can sell licenses to "unlock" their software in your device and get a cut from their sales? -> no it is not illegal
* Is it illegal to sell dev kits to the the above? So the device in question is still not a device you can develop on - but you can create another device where 3rd parties can develop on, and you can sell it to them. You can also pick and choose which companies you will work with. None of this is illegal.
* Is it illegal to automate all of the above? Provide low barrier to entry, no bureaucracy, if you want to develop for the device just do, pay us $100 a year, and give us a cut and you are golden! No need to get into direct contact with us, wait months to get our manual approval - we streamline everything and even the little guy can participate? -> HN thinks that this suddenly must be illegal. If they are providing all this service, they should be legally forced to do all for free.
They can choose to be compensated for their work, but in case of the 30% cut, they seem to want to be compensated for someone else’s work, because how much a successful app makes vs. an unsuccessful app is not a function of the SDK or the platform, which is the same for both. I would have no problem if they asked for a flat fee for providing their service. But they want to profit off the revenue of a whole ecosystem, and that has no quantitative relation to the effort of maintaining the OS and the SDK.
That’s just my personal opinion. The DMA is about anti-trust, that some companies are controlling a too large part of the cake, affecting too many users (end users as well as “business users”, e.g. app developers), which is bad for a competitive market and level playing field.
All of these are wrong. The answer to each of those is "It may or may not be legal depending on various factors including whether it is intentionally creating a monopolistic anti-competitive environment".
Laws are allowed to have very nuanced opinions where it's illegal for microsoft to disallow uninstalling Internet Explorer program (USA vs MS, 2001), but perfectly legal for microsoft do disallow installing the File Explorer program.
I know us programmers want laws to perfectly specified in unambiguous mathematics, but lawyers want laws to be specified in English with nuance and room for interpretation and judgement of intent and spirit.
It makes no sense to you because you are thinking like a programmer. Laws are for empathetic decent humans, not soulless hacker-news-posting programmers.
