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Apple's iPhone Developer Crisis
David Gerard writes "iPhone development sounds closed-shop but simple — apply to be a developer, put application on the App Store, you and Apple make money. Except Apple can't keep up with the request load — whereas getting a developer contract used to take a couple of days, it's now taking months. Some early developers' contracts are expiring with no notice of renewal options. And Apple has no idea what's going on or the state of things. If you want to maintain a completely closed system, it helps if you can actually keep up with it."
Reader h11:6 points out news of a recent study which suggests that "Android's open source nature will give it a boost over Apple's iPhone," and thus take the lead in sales as soon as three years from now. It will be interesting to see how they deal with the flood of proposed apps as their popularity rises.
That speaks volumes to either the ignorance of the developers or the myopic altruism of the developers. You take your pick. Do you want to leach off your family and never make money, thus guaranteeing yourself a life of obscurity or do you want to make money and help your family out by paying your own way?
Then again, you can always live in obscurity through being a perpetual grad student moving from one Masters/PhD to the next. Even then you eventually have to do research and generate income or you're the biggest overeducated douchebag battling Stallman for who has the biggest beard. Even he gets paid for his work, though he'd give you the impression that he's a charity case and this [GPL] is his Magnum Opus to the World.