Right-click on the app, choose "Open", it will ask you if you really wanna do that, allow, and for that app it will never ask you again.
Plus, pretty much every dev that hasn't abandoned their software is going to sign sooner or later.
Not necessarily. Signing costs money. You have to be part of the Mac Developer Program which costs $99 per year. If you develop free software, to pay $100 per year for no good reason is pretty stupid. If you're a huge company like Adobe and you make $100 per 2 seconds, yeah sure, then it's okay. But for freeware developers, no.
If Apple insists on pushing Gatekeeper, which I suspect they will in future releases, making it more difficult to disable, then they need to make it so that anyone can sign software for free, and only publishing to the Mac App Store costs money. That would be fair if you ask me.
This Gatekeeper thing is either going to not make much impact on anything, or it's going to make negative impact on freeware developers. More likely the latter. Most basic computer users will download a freeware application, try to open it, can't open it, and not know what's wrong.
I personally think it's a stupid feature. It should be off by default and turned on if the user sets it that way, not the other way around.
The whole concern about malware is completely blown out of proportion. So some script kiddies who develop Flashback to make advertising money get half a million installs? There are large botnets with over a million installs on Windows PCs. Do we hear about those in the same way we heard about Flashback? No.
As I said, blown out of proportion.
Any decent malware is spread by non-user-interaction. Malware developers like using exploited Java vulnerabilities to initiate payloads without requiring any sort of confirmation from the user. Because the chances of getting a user to execute a shady program decrease with every step the user must do.
If the user has to download, unpack, run, and authorize a piece of "malware" for Mac, that is not only pathetic for the user's stupidity, but for the fact that the developer couldn't figure out how to use a better attack vector.
Gatekeeper still will not stop vulnerabilities in Java (for those who've installed it) or other plugins, nor will it stop buffer exploits in services, or any other potential threat. It will only stop downloaded programs, which haven't proven to be a large threat like Flashback has anyways.
They are creating an artificial "need" for this Gatekeeper "protection". You did not need it before, you do not need it now. Not having it before didn't allow any major attacks in particular, and having it won't likely prevent any either. They are making people think they need things they don't need. Truth is, Apple has an ulterior motive. They want to push all software distribution to the Mac App Store so as to generate more profit for themselves. So they can grab that 30% cut of every paid app downloaded. This Gatekeeper thing is only the first step. Just watch. In future releases, it will get harder or even impossible to turn it off. In the future, OS X may require a "jailbreak" to run 3rd party software, but it would be pretty useless since any developer would rather distribute on the MAS. And the MAS's restrictions don't allow for freedom of software.
If things continue going in this direction, to the point I predicted, and I sure hope they don't, but if they do, I'll have to switch to a GNU/Linux OS that does respect my freedom.
As I said, it is a useless feature. It will not protect against any professional form of attack, and it will only hamper development of freeware. Bad idea, Apple.
