Mac Geekery

Well, it’s about damned time.

I’ve been wanting to write up some iPhone dev pieces for a while but pushed the idea aside because of the SDK NDA issue. Well, Apple’s finally come to their senses and removed the NDA so that developers can actually form a community now.

This is one of two major issues that have made developers uncertain about writing for the iPhone platform, what with Android coming very soon now. The other issue, which Apple has yet to deal with, is the rejection of applications based on unreleased criteria. Hopefully this action today means that they’re listening and will come to their senses on that mark soon as well.

To Our Developers

We have decided to drop the non-disclosure agreement (NDA) for released iPhone software.

We put the NDA in place because the iPhone OS includes many Apple inventions and innovations that we would like to protect, so that others don’t steal our work. It has happened before. While we have filed for hundreds of patents on iPhone technology, the NDA added yet another level of protection. We put it in place as one more way to help protect the iPhone from being ripped off by others.

However, the NDA has created too much of a burden on developers, authors and others interested in helping further the iPhone’s success, so we are dropping it for released software. Developers will receive a new agreement without an NDA covering released software within a week or so. Please note that unreleased software and features will remain under NDA until they are released.

Thanks to everyone who provided us constructive feedback on this matter.

And on that note, while I try to put some time aside to write about some iPhone topics, if you have something you want to write feel free to submit it. As always, if you include a Google AdSense ID in your account profile the site will use that code when displaying your article (about 80% of the time) so you’ll get something out of it that way as well.