You know, when you can reliably expect Jon Gruber's opinions on a matter to lean pro-Apple -- when he does all sorts of mental gymnastics to make the logic come out right, no matter how absurd it sounds -- well, how is he not regarded as a shill?
On the one hand you have Apple, who charges 30% for access to a platform. An app developer creates that value by writing something that people want, and then Apple takes 30% to deliver it.
On the other hand you have Readability, who essentially creates a filter for content -- just a little bit beyond applying a stylesheet to the content, as far as the end result goes. The actual mechanics are more involved, but the end-result is the same as if someone were to apply a custom CSS to your article that made it nice and, well, readable. And for this service, they charge $5/mo and spread 70% of your $5 with the producers of the different content which gets made readable.
To say then, that Readability is creating content is ridiculous. They are transforming existing content -- there is no comparison between them and, say, Amazon, who this policy is meant to target. Under Gruber's definition of 'serving up content', the mini Opera browser which delivers pre-rendered images of web pages (on some platforms) is also 'serving up content'.
Hell, VNC clients can easily be construed to be content servers under this rationalization!
But everyone else here is talking about this specific case, which, as you suggest, seems startlingly out-of-character for him.
Glenn Beck occasionally disagrees with the Republicans too but I bet I know how he'll vote in most elections.
Amazon isn't creating content either. They are reformatting books into the Kindle format. Which is similar to what Readability does.
How is that different to the way that Readability take written content, pay the owner of the content money, and sell it on at a mark up based on reformatting it in a way which adds value to the consumer?
The key difference between Readability and an RSS reader, is the RSS reader hands no money to the content creator.
I don't like this as I like the idea of Readability but I can't dispute that what they do is basically the same as what Amazon do.
One thing I would say is that I think Readability get a lot of credit for the fact that they will distribute payments to small content creators.
While this is obviously great, I'd be really interested to know how much of what they pay out goes to bloggers and how much goes to the usual suspects. I'm guessing that in reality it doesn't end up supporting the small guys as much as we'd like simply because most of what is read comes from the big providers - that's why they're big in the first place.
Apple's core, recurring problem is that they're writing rules intended for well-defined software and services, but they simply can not account for all the software that doesn't neatly fit into those buckets.
There is almost nothing they can do with the store without running afoul of some well-meaning edge case.
Remember when Steve Jobs presented the first third-party developer solution for iPhone: web apps?
"If all you have to offer is a shit sandwich, just say it. Don’t tell us how lucky we are and that it’s going to taste delicious." - John Gruber
By Gruber's own admission, he wants Apple to succeed. Everything else is secondary.
He has also admitted that he wants Google and Android to succeed. That doesn't mean he agrees with all their strategies, no matter how selectively you want to define "strategy".
Gruber wants Google and Android (and Palm and webOS) to succeed so they can keep Apple sharp and on top of the game; Gruber doesn't want Apple's competitors to succeed in and of themselves, his desire is predicated on more success for Apple.
Gruber's views are sufficiently nuanced to allow some disagreements with Apple on minor issues while still remaining in agreement of their overall goals. I'm not the one 'splitting hairs' by pointing that out, indeed it's actually Gruber's arguments that appear so (his dismissal of the Readability blog post because they seem like a content publisher—even though Readability isn't—is an example of him drawing arbitrary lines in the sand)
I like Gruber but I know that some things are going to come with a certain spin.