I appreciate the link wmf...I read Gruber's blog, but I missed that post.
I agree with John's premise that "Just because someone is satisfied with a bad deal doesn't mean it isn't a bad deal."
I'm not, however, going to get morally outraged over another person's business decision to participate in a transaction just because a third-party doesn't think the remuneration is equitable. The indie developers that are participating obviously liked the deal they were offered well enough, right? Otherwise they wouldn't have agreed to participate. I think griping about a deal that you agreed to after the fact is unprofessional. If you were a schmuck and agreed to a bad deal, you just have to suck it up and learn from it.
I can think of one great reason I would personally consider participating in this "inequitable" arrangement if I were a Mac shareware developer: any future revenue from upgrades are not shared with MacHeist. I don't see where Gruber takes that into consideration. I had never heard of a few of these applications until MacHeist promoted them, yet I'm likely to upgrade any of the apps I actually like as they release new versions. MacHeist is a form of advertising, and all advertising is somewhat of a calculated risk...this promotion will probably pay off for some of the developers and be a waste of time for others. Either way, it's not my job to count my neighbor's coins for them.
Yeah, I'm not outraged over it either. I suspect that MacHeist and the participating developers never anticipated selling as many copies as they did, so they didn't consider that MacHeist might walk away with most of the money. Since this is the second year, developers are probably a little smarter in their negotiations. I think it's worth discussing since "how to not get ripped off while starting your business" is a popular topic here on YC.
http://daringfireball.net/2006/12/iniquities_of_the_selfish