I wonder if there is a better analogy then someone putting together a campaign for public office. What MacHeist is doing seems to be what most middle-men do in business, namely, act as a go-between the consumer and the producers. In a business like paper products, they would be the distributors. Now as someone who has a brother in the paper distribution business I can understand why one might have a problem with these businesses. They don't produce anything, they simply advertise and bundle products. Maybe what Merlin and others are reacting to is the archaic feel of a 20th century mode of distribution. As web saavy 21st century individuals, I think many of us may feel that producers (developers) shouldn't have to go through distributors and subsequently lose a portion of the value of their product. While I can understand the intuitive negative reaction MacHeist might engender as a distributor, there doesn't seem to me to be anything inherently wrong with developers going that route - a route which does in this case benefit consumers.