Apple has announced that it's lifting the non-disclosure agreement on 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.
But there was a downside..
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.
And let's not forget how it came about:
Thanks to everyone who provided us constructive feedback on this matter.
Where in this case "constructive feedback" would be "telling Apple to drop the NDA". (In one case, through a site's name - which now shows the relief on developers', um, web faces.)
This also means that the book that was planned on developing for the iPhone can go ahead - and that at least one London company that was planning to offer an iPhone development course, and would otherwise have had to have signed its students to NDAs themselves before they could come in, can breathe a bit easier.
This is separate, of course, from the "mysterious methods used to choose which software can and can't go onto the iPhone App Store", which hasn't stopped riling developers. Apple came back to me a week after my initial enquiry as to what its policy was, to say that it was "still awaiting clarification from the US". Possibly that will be the next one to be crystallised into something more helpful. Though we're not, as ever, holding our breath.
