1) The goal is to enable great apps that don't damage our ecosystem. This creates a healthy environment where everyone is happy and wants to continue investment.
If we didn't want people to build apps, we never would have launched a platform. If we're shutting people off for no good reason, it is a waste of our time and yours. But we would be foolish not let us protect ourselves from people actively causing harm.
2) There was a reason the platform was labeled as "Early Access" before today: there were key pieces missing, such as SSL support.
We always wanted to have SSL, but it was later on the roadmap than shipping code that worked over HTTP. SSL isn't trivial when using a CDN. It's not an unsolved problem, but we wanted to do it in a solid fashion, and that took time when balanced with other features we were building.
I have also built for the LinkedIn API. The TOS is very unnerving and I personally wouldn't build any kind of business on it. LinkedIn has a lot of good data but they own it, and developers have to come to terms with that. I think LinkedIn rests on a gold mine of business intelligence data that they are using much too lightly.
This is probably exactly why they act the way they do: they know the data is a goldmine and they want to protect that resource. Create a very narrow TOS and await ideas from the developer community such that they get a good idea of what to build on that data in the future.
If we didn't want people to build apps, we never would have launched a platform. If we're shutting people off for no good reason, it is a waste of our time and yours. But we would be foolish not let us protect ourselves from people actively causing harm.
2) There was a reason the platform was labeled as "Early Access" before today: there were key pieces missing, such as SSL support.
We always wanted to have SSL, but it was later on the roadmap than shipping code that worked over HTTP. SSL isn't trivial when using a CDN. It's not an unsolved problem, but we wanted to do it in a solid fashion, and that took time when balanced with other features we were building.