Apple has been getting progressively more aggressive in its attitude towards Adobe Flash since the release of the original iPhone back in 2007. The latest move by the company may have put it in the crosshairs of Washington’s industry watchdogs, says to the New York Post.

“According to a person familiar with the matter, the Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission are locked in negotiations over which of the watchdogs will begin an antitrust inquiry into Apple’s new policy of requiring software developers who devise applications for devices such as the iPhone and iPad to use only Apple’s programming tools.”

The policy they are referring to is Section 3.3.1 of the iPhone Developer Program License Agreement which bans the use of programs that allow developers to write applications once and then compile them to run on many different platforms. This ban is seen as a targeted a attack at Adobe Packager for iPhone which creates stand-alone iPhone applications based on code written for Flash.

Apple’s attitude was clearly expressed by Steve Jobs in an open letter on the matter. According to Jobs, cross platform development tools like the one offered by Adobe stifle innovation because they move forward with the lowest common set of features across the platforms that they support rather than allow developers to take full advantage of the latest and greatest of an individual platform. On the other side of that coin are small developers who often lack the funds required to write different versions of their applications to release on all platforms. In their case, cross compilers allow them to reach the largest possible audience with the smallest possible investment.

At this point it is unclear that an inquiry will ever lead to a full fledged anti trust suit against Apple but it seems that the company that assured us that “1984 won’t be like ‘1984’” is coming eerily close to Big Brother in 2010.

Read more: NY Post via Gizmodo

LineHive by Tim Shi