I think the issue here is not about spurring more development, its about chilling development in areas Apple does not find useful for their product range.

I had never thought that the people who receive gifts should reject them, but I’m worried about two things:

a) Will developers who did not receive gifts get disenchanted with the FL/OSS development model ? I’m not sure how Apple decided who gets gifts, but if it was about some numerical quantity – such as number of commits – then I’m sure the person in the 13th place, maybe just a few commits short of a Macbook Pro would feel a bit down for it.

b) Would OSS developers who work on non-Apple benefiting projects stop working on said projects and flock to Apple funded OSS software ?

I’m not saying that Apple should stop giving back monetary compensation to the community – I just think that in every good deed there is the potential for a negative backlash and that Apple can also give back to the community in a way that does not benefit only a select number of people, but the Mac OS-X FL/OSS community in general, or the Darwin community in general, or possibly even the entire FL/OSS community in general.