New Mac Develop Licenses for just $99/year

The Apple’s developer page took a little downtime early today to do a little “maintenance” and returned not too long ago with some updates to the Mac developer license agreements and pricing. While the majority of us have been going crazy about the iPad and iPhone updates,9to5mac took a little time to speculate what these changes to the Mac developer licenses could mean for the future of app development on Macs. Of course the new pricing and structure means a more streamlined and less expensive experience for Mac developers, but 9to5mac thinks about if this is really the first step toward an App Store specifically for Mac, and we like where they’re going with it…

“A $99 Mac Developer license means the barrier to Mac development is lowered for all of those thousands of developers who’ve had different measures of success on the iPhone. Those developers, who can now port their apps to the Mac platform as widgets or full fledged Mac applications, need a means of distribution as well. And a way to make some money, and a way to market and organize their applications…and, well you see where we’re going here.

Obviously the hated DRM question would be a big one. Would Apple distribute protected applications for Mac? Would it be over iTunes still? Not sure.”