Apple developer accounts cost $100/year; if you are in the position of having more than 100 devices you need to routinely test your applications on at your large organization, you can certainly get more developer accounts (even if it is just reimbursing employees for bringing their own developer account with them as they work their job).
From what I understand, Apple's concern is circumventing the App Store, making it possible for developers to distribute apps that Apple hasn't seen yet. In short, the concern is viruses, worms and other security issues. This, I believe, is why they don't change the limits.
Yep, I know that is one of their worries. Parallel store, bypassing Apple's payment system and creating a bad user experience. However, the number of users that jailbreak their iPhone and use Cydia is small, and the new iPhone users are more and more regular people and will not jailbreak their phone. In essence, Apple has all the control it needs to prevent this and shouldn't worry about it
(Note: I realize that this is somewhat off-topic for the thread as a whole, but I post it as a direct response to the specific argument you are making in your comment. With that in mind, I will also explicitly say I don't even disagree with your conclusion: I just feel that there is a misconception about jailbreaking that should be corrected that is causing the argument to not really follow all the way through to the conclusion. In the end, I still agree that Apple already has the control they need in this scenario, and the suggested solutions in the article would not cause them any challenges in that regard.)
The percentage of people jailbreaking their iPhone over time has not really fallen, excepting of course times when we don't have a current jailbreak (like now, but that rebounds quickly when we do as the demand is latent and pounces); I wouldn't even call it small, as it hovers upwards of 10%: of the hundreds of millions of active devices Apple has out there, tens of millions of them are jailbroken (and yes: they are often current devices; the people most likely to want the absolute newest device constantly are also the people most likely to want even more out of it and thereby jailbreak).
That said, that isn't really relevant: jailbreaking has nothing at all to do with the device testing limit on applications because jailbreaking isn't really about applications: it is about all of the little modifications we make to existing software using my Substrate library... the default repositories in Cydia actually carry an insignificant number of "applications" (something that could be installed with a developer certificate) in comparison to the number of Substrate extensions. If you told me tomorrow that everyone in the world could now get infinite developer certificate access, we in the jailbreak community would say "so what? that doesn't help us" and continue with business as usual.
The suggestions in this article are somewhat reasonable in scope, and would not affect that issue greatly; meanwhile, if there is a serious issue with a developer abusing their certificate, they expire within the year and Apple can make their lives really hard if they ever want to get another one.
I'd be ok with a limit if there weren't a 1 year period for reclaiming a license. What's annoying is having a bunch of unused UDIDs - whether from departed users or abandoned phones.
