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Inside Apple's iPhone SDK Gag Order
snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Tom Yager takes a closer look at Apple's iPhone SDK confidentiality agreement, which restricts developers from discussing the SDK or exchanging ideas with others, thereby leaving no room for forums, newsgroups, open source projects, tutorials, magazine articles, users' groups, or books. But because anyone is free to obtain the iPhone SDK by signing up for it, Apple is essentially branding publicly available information as confidential. This 'puzzling contradiction' is the 'antithesis of the developer-friendly Apple Developer Connection' on which the iPhone SDK program is based, Yager contends. 'You'll see arguments from armchair legal analysts that the iPhone developer Agreements won't stand up in court — but those analysts certainly won't stand up in court on your behalf.' Anyone planning to launch an iPhone forum or open source project should have 'a lawyer draft your request for exemption, and make sure that the Apple staffer granting it personally commits to status as authorized to approve exceptions to the iPhone Registered Developer and iPhone SDK Agreements,' Yager warns."
I am a big Apple supporter and member of the apple rumors community... however...
Apple can get away with this because they can outspend almost any web/forum site. If they are in the right or wrong, who cares? They can keep throwing lawyers at you until you give.
They attack Apple rumors site on a routine basis for BS claims of copyright or trade secrets. If I take a picture of somebody else holding a pre-release iPhone, how is that copyright? They are in the public!
Look at the EULA and Apple attacking the company making mac clones. Most lawyers do not think that the EULA would stand; however, no company (other than microsoft or google) could tolerate the time/money that fighting would cost.
So with this NDA issue, I can't buy a book, read a forum, get any assistance at all with writing my iPhone application... So what the hell good is an SDK you can't talk about? Is this cellular fight club or something?
Apple, fix this shit. Really. Fix it now. There's no excuse for not letting the NDA go, no way that it protects you. The phone's been jailbroken, it _will_ be unlocked, so why stifle development?
My own pointless vanity vintage computing page
The market will bear it, and that's that.
What?
Yes, Do Without.
I really don't understand why everyone is willing to buy Apple products at inflated prices with draconian contracts of adhesion.
A phone is a phone is a phone. Don't fall for it.
Buy generic phones, or better yet, just take the free one provided with your wireless providers contract of adhesion.
If more people thought this way, there would be less of this insanity in the marketplace, and manufactures would have to compete by price alone.
...then the future for computer users and developers is heading toward some pretty shitty seas.
http://mediagoblin.org/
Apple doesn't support developers.
They focus solely on end user consumers.
apple: are you trying to dislodge MS as the most hated computer company around? keep it up, mate....
They're already there, as far as I'm concerned. Apple's business practices just reeks of some mad power trip in general. They absolutely despise people using their products (be it hardware or software) in ways that they had not intended. Microsoft is FAR their superior in that regard. The main evil with Microsoft is seen by the IT professional, not the consumer. With Apple, it's generally the other way around.
The only explanation I can see for Apple's recent surge in popularity is their marketing, which is absolutely top notch.
Well, maybe that's because, like most other professions, lawyers need to be paid money in exchange for work done.
Giving legal advice and running proceedings costs money and exposes the lawyer to risk (i.e. suits from the person receiving the advice if they rely on it and it turns out to be wrong).
Read Pynchon.
What, you thought Apple was nice, warm and fuzzy? Where have you been? They are just as cut-throat as Microsoft. They just have cooler stuff at higher prices.
Can you think of a single fanboy that doesn't defend his obsession to death? ... then again, I guess that *is* the definition of fanboy.
It won't end until the piratebay.org steps in and provides a safe, secure, overseas forum to discuss apple products.
... its just talking to another human being who has the same program you have... like, Idea sharing.
OH wait, this isn't even piracy. It isn't even 'stealing'
I guess they really mean it when they say "Think Different". As in, don't you DARE think what he's thinking. Don't even think about thinking about it...
apple doesn't support end user consumers either. It only supports people who conform to their idea of an end user consumer...
Kaspersky dosen't like that idea
Slashdotters apparently don't like that you can never write browsers, music/video players or background applications.
I can't think of any other company that has ever done anything like this. I'm really just curious, has any company ever publicised a SDK that has been so very private and restrictive? No other browsers?!?
This story reminds me of the time I tried to hook my Apple cinema display up to my Cable box's DVI port, it's just not worth it, even if you get it to work, you have 5 more lbs of monitor you've got to hide somewhere, just because Apple wanted to squeeze a little dough out of people with more proprietary cable connectors.
Apple has always been about "Show me the money", every action they take reemphasized that they are only interested in more money, not innovation. Here though, they really go out of their way to stifle innovation with literals like "...calling other frameworks, other APIs or otherwise...". It really says it all, don't bother trying to write this for our hardware, you may compete with us in such a way that we can't fuck you properly.
Apple.
Sign your life away, forever.
Apple is your god now.
Your life as you know it is over.
Apple is to be worshipped forever and ever.
Apple tv, Apple phone, Apple cpu, Apple
games [ lol ] , Apple colours, Apple [noun].
Apple is as open source as [ I can't think of
a good pun ].
Apple will go open source when pigs fly.
There. I got it.
Who will they sue, exactly?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
The only explanation I can see for Apple's recent surge in popularity is their marketing, which is absolutely top notch.
So in the past 10 years, the switch to a unix based operating system with modern object oriented apis, the switch to intel hardware that made an easier transition for windows developers, the acquisition and development of technologies like multi-touch, the negotiating with record labels to break out of the subscription model, the adoption of open source for many parts of the operating system (from Darwin to WebKit) and so on had nothing to do with it?
Yeah, it's silly that they haven't lifted the NDA yet, but it's not like developers have gotten excited about their platform because of brightly colored commercials.
Every anti-competitive trick used by M$ is also used by Apple. However, M$ has a monopoly and Apple doesn't. For some people, this is reason enough to abstain from hating Apple. Unfortunately, such people don't realize that they are just becoming silent promoters of such tricks.
The largest prime factor of my UID is 263267.
If you read the documentation that is available after agreeing to the discolsure agreement, you'll see that it is all marked as unfinished. They have a reasonably strong argument in their favor of preventing the widespread publishing of stupid wrong information based on incomplete and potentially incorrect documentation while they finish it up.
The NDA will surely be lifted when the documentation is finished.
I read the script, and I think it would help my character's motivation if he was on fire. -Bender
As an owner of an iPhone 3G who previously owned dozens of different phones from all possible manufacturers (SE, Nokia, Siemens, Motorola, HTC, Samsung, just to name a few), I have to say that iPhone is superior for two simple facts:
1) It is, BY FAR, the most intuitive and easy-to-use-out-of-the-box phone I have ever used.
2) It is fun to use. Sure, all new phones are fun in the beginning, but after 2 weeks with this phone I still enjoy every time I surf the web or write an eMail with it. Something that never happend to me with any other phone (and not with any of the same generation competitors of the iPhone).
So yes, it has many downsides, Apple are bastards when it comes to their control freakiness but their products are better.
In fact, I'd go so far as to say sometimes Apple's anti-competitive practices make Microsoft look like angels by comparison.
I'm no M$ fan in anyway but I do find it remarkable how much stuff Apple get away.
I'm mainly a Linux/Open Source user but I really don't have a problem with people paying for software if that's what they want to do.
But I really get annoyed with the people on /. who view Apple as a company that does them some kind of favour.
There's no doubt that Microsoft wants nothing more than to lock users into Windows & developers into DotNet but because they're so vocal about it, Apple themselves uses it as marketing tool in order to position themselves into the market also, as being "better than Microsoft".
But the fact is, both companies make use of closed source operating systems and deploy DRM heavily in their products. They are also both owned by shareholders and therefore have a duty to make as much money as possible - any director in either company would be kicked out, and might even find him/herself in a courtroom if he/she didn't make that the first priority.
So let's stop with the pretence that Apple is any different to Microsoft - they're not. And whilst you may think it's "cool" & "geeky" to own a Mac or Macbook, in reality you've just been suckered in by Apple to pay more for a computer purely because it's a fashion accessory - but if you're happy with that then good luck to you.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
The Safari on Windows license was promptly fixed when Apple was informed of the issue. Silly mistake? Sure. Indicative of Apple being overly litigious? Grow the fuck up already.
Well, yes.
You think Apple deliberately specified that Safari for Windows could only be installed on Apple branded computers?
And that they're going to enforce it and bring cases against anyone who installed it?
I'd say this is quite possibly just like that kind of bug.
Too true!
A Mac can set you back a few thousand, but Microsoft's PC only... uh... okay, Microsoft don't sell PCs.
So OS X costs $129, which is just ridiculous compared to Microsoft's Vista, which is only... oh. $239 is the recommended price for Home Premium, and goes up to $399 for Ultimate.
Well, at least Microsoft beat Apple on mouse prices! Woo! Good mice too (I always use them).
Yup, except for computers and operating systems, Microsoft beat Apple's pricing every time.
To be fair, they don't make computers.
I own an iPod Touch and it is HANDS DOWN the greatest tech device I've ever bought. There is nothing else like it on the market right now.
It's a music player. Maybe Cover Flow gives you a warm and fuzzy feeling, and maybe you like to "touch", but there are plenty of other fine music players. In fact, just from the point of playing stuff, something with real buttons that you can feel when the thing is in your pocket is superior.
The reason I don't have an iPod is because I need to use iTunes in order to use it. iTunes has destroyed my music collection, not once but several times. The iTunes user interface also has serious problems, as the many third party attempts at fixing it show.
The iPod Touch hardware is nice, but until Apple opens it up so that it can officially synchronize with other music management software and until it can officially be programmed as an OS X system, I think it's foolish to buy one.
"but there is nothing wrong with that because Apple has no monopoly in any market."
Nothing wrong to you maybe, personally I think no matter what the game, the players should all be playing by the same rules.
"the whole sue-the-blogger fiasco was grounded in law"
Yea, grounded in bad law, which doesn't make it right. The Nuremberg trials after the Holocaust established that.
Let's be clear, given the evidence at hand, if history was different and Apple were in Microsoft's position there would be, if anything, far less openness and freedom for innovation in the software industry.
Nothing wrong to you maybe, personally I think no matter what the game, the players should all be playing by the same rules.
The effect of which will be to ensure that an entrenched monopoly can never be taken down, even by a better competitor.
As an example, imagine any competitor selling a product when the monopoly can temporarily drop their price to near zero.
Playing by the same rules is nice on paper, but when you get into reality you have to see that the big players have more clout than the little ones, so unless their hands are tied in some manner, they'll kill the little players stone dead. It is in their interest to kill competition off as quickly as possible.
Anti-trust laws (and their equivalents around the world) are an attempt to even the playing field, not distort it.
Yea, grounded in bad law, which doesn't make it right. The Nuremberg trials after the Holocaust established that.
You are kidding here, I assume. No sane person could put those two together.
Moving swiftly on...
Let's be clear, given the evidence at hand, if history was different and Apple were in Microsoft's position there would be, if anything, far less openness and freedom for innovation in the software industry.
No, you think this is so. I think it's not. History went another way and we can only speculate. Don't pretend that your opinion is any more valid than mine on this. We're both guessing.
The main evil with Microsoft is seen by the IT professional, not the consumer. With Apple, it's generally the other way around.
It's the IT professionals and developers that are on Microsoft's and Apple's case. The consumer just doesn't care either way. The regular consumer doesn't care that the iPhone SDK is under a strict NDA because the regular consumer doesn't write iPhone apps. The regular consumer judges the product by what it is capable of doing right now, and not what it can do if hackers got a hold of it. This is why Microsoft is losing market share to Apple; not because Microsoft is evil and Apple is less evil, but because Microsoft Vista makes using the computer a more difficult experience than Apple does. There's a lot of whining going on among developers, and the main difference is that developers and power users want the hardware to be free and open to them to do as they please because functionality is king. Apple, though, wants it closed so they could keep the user experience consistent for the regular consumer because to them form is king*. This is the unstoppable force meeting the immovable object and the argument has been going on with Apple for over a decade.
* Of course, there will be people responding that Apple thinks money, and not form, is king, and that's the ultimate truth. To Apple, though, making a product with a consistent and pleasing user interface is what's making them money hand over fist.
Don't trust a bull's horn, a doberman's tooth, a runaway horse or me.
Apple will never be in Microsoft's position because of their behavior... it automatically limits them to a low percent. Microsoft got where they are because they allowed (encouraged) rampant piracy of everybody else's stuff, Hardware, BIOS, etc. and they let any developer play for cheap with almost no strings. Of course that's why we have the huge mess of poor security, out-of-date browsers, and masses of old code that won't go away... being so big cost them the first-mover position... Forget how many copies of Vista are sold... how many REPLACED XP? Apple is pushing 30%-50% upgrade rate on Tiger boxes... Microsoft couldn't touch that if they gave the new OS away for free.. the joys of being a monopoly is that you have to cater to EVERYONE... Microsoft table scraps would create another Apple-size company overnight.
Being litigious is not so bad that you can't do it? even though my sense of humor gave me no choice but to reply to clearly a joke with an apparently serious and detailed post? If that is the sort of fight you want you may talk to my lawyer, but it is much less fun than the one I was after.
Look out!
I will have to concur with GaryPatterson here: equality is treating equals equally and treating differents differently. The trick is to know who is equal (white people == black people == homosexual people) and who is different (enterprise with competition != monopolist or semi-monopolist), etc...
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
Like blocking anyone that wanted to ever sell a system with MacOS(X)? installed? Via lawsuit?
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
Er, what? How is that good governance. I'm trying really hard to think of why we should allow artificial product tying ... and failing.
How is society served by requiring iTunes to activate an iPhone? How does the free market benefit when Apple abuse their iTunes install base to install Safari for Windows?
I can swallow "natural" tying .... like the iPhone SDK to a Mac .... because implementing the SDK in a cross platform fashion is hard and that shouldn't be an aspect of law. But Apple actually had to go out of their way to make the iPhone depend on iTunes and I'm just having a really hard time seeing why that kind of crap should only be illegal when you're a monopoly. Because to me it seems inherently bad.
Another non-sequitur. A company is just a group of people. It's not illogical to dislike a company, anymore than it's illogical to dislike a group of bullies at high school, or a band, or a political party. Companies don't get a special "get out of emotions free" card through virtue of being incorporated.
Apples surge in popularity is mostly with the "man on the street", really. All the things you listed with the exception of record labels are only relevant to developers, and to be frank weren't all that popular with them either.
"A switch to a UNIX based operating system with modern APIs" you say? Some people might think that's a good thing. All I see is a crappy, creaking OS base made by some frankestein combination of BSD and NeXT - not exactly sprightly even back then. Don't get me wrong - I'm typing this on an OS X 10.4 box. But innovation would have been something like Microsoft Singularity: identifying a real problem computer users faced, and coming up with some real innovative solutions to it. Stuff we'd never seen before. Instead we got the 70s in new makeup.
The switch to Intel hardware was a giant PITA for developers and mostly invisible for end users. They did it because it was necessary to move forward, not to win popularity.
Adopting open source for parts of the OS is really a giant red herring. Using open source is not inherently virtuous, lots of companies do that. Giving back is. Apples own open source contributions are pretty lame IMHO - Safari is closed source, even though web browsers are a commodity and there's nothing especially innovative in there. WebKit is open source because they based it on KHTML but I remember when it first came out, the KHTML developers were pretty frustrated by Apples minimal-compliance unusable patch dumps.
So when will they? The obvious time to lift the NDA would have been the release of the iPhone 3G, but it seems it's still in effect. That's a pretty major oversight if it's a mistake. If it's not a mistake .... erm .... what the hell are they thinking?!?
I'll try to respond easily to your comment of:
"If more people thought this way, there would be less of this insanity in the marketplace, and manufactures would have to compete by price alone."
Actually, I can't. That is one of the stupidest things I've ever heard. If manufacturers compete on price alone, all we are left with as consumers, is crappy generic products.
Competition based on design, functionality, features, quality, service etc is a Good Thing. Competition based purely on price is a race to the bottom. It hurts us, the consumers. It hurts the employees of the manufacturers as they fight to keep costs as low as possible.
G4 Hackintosh
They tie it to iTunes, because that's the software they use for synchronising it with a computer. It also happens to be the software that someone owning an Apple device with music capabilities is likely to be using.
Would you also be complaining if they released some standalone sync software, which did exactly the same thing as iTunes currently does?
Rules do change when you hit monopoly status. But just because some shady business practice is legal doesn't make it right, something that should escape criticism, or something that we want to support by purchasing Apple's products.
Some of us don't want to give our money to any company that tries to force you into a contractual relationship just to develop your own software, thus stifling open source development. Much like we don't want to give our money to companies that try to shackle their customers - why should a customer have to "jailbreak" their iPhone?
A company is supposed to be about providing value to its customers, not luring them with a little value, then turning around and denying the customer fair use of their own property just to extract their pound of flesh from a largely captive audience. Some phone carriers do this kind of nonsense by crippling the Bluetooth profiles on phones its customers use. Heaven forbid you add your own ringtones, even though the phone is capable of it, rather than pay the carrier for the exact same data you've already bought elsewhere. Apple does it by limiting your ability to put files on the phone, limiting what software can be developed for the phone, and generally trying to prevent you from using your own device in any way Apple doesn't like. It's like GM selling cars that won't drive near a Midas shop.
These sorts of things are all very legal but also anti-consumer. The GP is right that these tactics aren't going to go away as long as people continue to tolerate and encourage them by patronizing such companies.
I am currently shopping for a phone. The iPhone would have been one of my leading candidates if it wasn't for this kind of nonsense. I'll probably end up getting an HTC model instead. If more people took that approach, maybe Apple would get the message that what it's doing isn't acceptable.
It's different from a monopoly's position in that you can just go out and buy a different phone. One that does essentially the same thing. (Or a different MP3 player or a different computer). You can't just go out and buy a non-Microsoft version of Windows.
So, if you don't like the product tying, do what I do, and stay clear of Apple. You don't lose out (except from iTunes trashing your computer, and a more rapidly decreasing bank balance). I wouldn't say that product tying is 'bad', but I do think it's stupid (Apple obviously disagree, and they may be in a strong enough position for it to work for them). I'd be more willing to consider Apple products if there wasn't the tying, but I don't think they'll be losing sleep because of a few people who choose what to buy based on that rather than visual appeal or keeping in with the crowd.
(You could say that Windows isn't a monopoly, there's Linux and MacOS in competition - but the courts don't see it that way)
"It's pretty clear that Google NDAs are temporary."
Is it?
"Google officials pledged (several times) that they are going to open most of the SDK"
"Most" is not all.
"Personally, I believe them."
I base my opinions on past behaviour, which indicates that Google are, like Apple and MS, only open when it benefits them financially:
http://picasa.google.com/linux/faq.html#26
"Picasa for Linux isn't open source"
Google Toolbar EULA, Intellectual Property clause:
"You acknowledge that Google or third parties own all rights, title and interest in and to the Google Toolbar"
Google Maps API, terms of service:
"In order to obtain the API, You must have a Google Account. After supplying Google with Your account information, the URL of your service, and agreeing to the Terms of Service, You will be issued an alphanumeric key assigned to You by Google that is uniquely associated with your Google Account and the URL of your service. Your service must import the Google Maps API using an HTML tag that contains this key, as described in the Maps API documentation, and Google will block requests with an invalid key or invalid URL. Google shall have sole and complete control over the map data and format. You may not obtain more than one key for use in the Service."
Read the last one with care to see that Google are every bit as much control freaks as Apple and MS. So while I find your faith in them touching, they have a long way to go before I believe anything they say about Android and openness.
I'm not going to change your sheets again, Mr. Hastings.
I sometimes get the idea that Apple is stuck in the early 1980s when every company made stuff that was only ocmpatible with their stuff. I know it's not that bad, but sometimes I wonder why I bought an iMac and a MacBook Pro. If only they would use open standards, or their software had the option to save the files you are working with in more or less open (or much used) standards, our lives would be so much better.
-- Cheers!
What a load of nonsense you've written there. You complain about Apple tying the iPhone to iTunes. Well, sure, but here's the thing: iTunes is free, and if iTunes didn't exist, you'd still have to install some Apple-written piece of software on your system to synch it with the iPhone, so I really don't see what your point is - you're complaining because the piece of Apple software that you have to install does more than the bare minimum? Good grief, Evil Apple!
You may dismiss OSX as "upgrade" pricing, but the fact remains you can take ANY blank hard drive, stick it in/on a modern-ish Mac (last 6 years or so) and install a full version of the "upgrade" OS on it where no version of the OS existed before. That, my friends, disqualifies your "upgrade" argument. Proprietary is the argument I believe you are looking for.
I agree, but you have to remember that their overbearing protection schemes are also the reason that their products are popular. Say what you want about it from a Freedom perspective, but when one person/group/company controls the entire ecosystem, they're able to weed out the junk that plagues the other ecosystems out there. A year and a half on I still can't get decent drivers for Vista for my very-current-at-the-time system, but I've absolutely never had issues of hardware or driver compatibility on my MBP.
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
For what it's worth, there is no "right" way to do corporate accounting. Every company is complex and nuanced. Apple included.
But more to the point: Apple sees a material tax benefit by requiring consideration (read: compensation) for certain types of upgrades.
But there is no legal benefit to charging $10. $1 or $0.10 would be adequate.
I think the iPhone has great potential, but until the development kit is as open as Palm's (the Palm OS SDK was based on GCC and included an open source emulator) or even Microsoft's I'm not interested. I'm not interested in jailbreaking an iPhone, or otherwise sneaking around behind Apple's back either. It's not a "smartphone" in the usual sense, it's just a really nice high end cellphone.
I'm also not that much interested in Android, since its only official API is Java based. It seems like you can run Java apps in half the phones out there these days, so it's not really offering a lot more than Nokia or Samsung.
So this whole thing is a tempest in a teapot. There's nothing that really matters for open systems developers, because these aren't particularly open systems even without this kind of restriction.
I'm relatively sure that Apple doesn't care if a few geeks want to use something other than iTunes to synch with their iPods. Most people wouldn't want to use anything other than iTunes - having to manually keep your iPod's firmware up to date, no synching of contacts/agenda, not having easy access to the iTunes Store, and for what? So that you can use another piece of software with only half the functionality.
Anyhow, this is a really dumb argument. If you have to go after Apple, why not try shooting at a real problem - like the NDA on the iPhone SDK for example. After all, at least that would be on topic...
When the iPod syncs media - the files themselves aren't the only data being written to the device. iTunes also updates a database that contains the ID3 information for all the tracks, and, in the case of newer ipods, album art. If the iPod simply synced like a mass storage device, it would have to use it's own resources (e.g. battery, processor) to do exactly the same indexing, which would mean more disk reads, and more RAM usage (and subsequently a shorter battery life). With iTunes doing the syncing, all of that work is offloaded to the computer, and the iPod has to do *none* of this work - which yields better battery life, a more responsive interface for browsing, and shorter loading times for music files. While many of these issues are mitigated by the faster processors and flash memory in newer iPods, the whole iPod/iTunes ecosystem started when iPods (and pretty much every other PMP on the market) were slow, low on RAM and contained HDDs only.
Sure, this also gives apple some lock-in, but given the many other syncing options out there (at least for media files on the ipod) for all the major operating systems, it's obviously not that bad.
The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources. - Albert Einstein
So they bought a hardware that wasn't even hinted as being 802.11n-ready and could have just used it as before for free, but instead were duped into updating it for far less it would have cost them to buy new hardware.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
In case anyone missed this detail, Apple charges TWO DOLLARS to enable a feature that was not previously offered (these machines were not sold as "802.11n ready" or "802.11n support coming real soon now" or anything like that). Anyone who bought one, and opted not to pay the additional $1.99, got exactly what they paid for, a machine with IEEE802.11b/g support.
Apple believes that if they didn't do this, they could be in huge trouble with the SEC. Apple may be wrong about that, but they're not selling a $2 upgrade because they want your money.
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$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
Which part of dependency you do not get? I have music on my computer, I want to transfer it to another device. I own the computer, the other device and the songs. Why do I need to get a software from Apple to transfer songs? Why can't I just drag and drop folders/files - like I can do with my iriver?
Because it's an iPod/iPhone, and not an iRiver. The consumer chooses the product, and it's certainly not the only product around. If you want to drag and drop folders, well, as you say, you can buy something else.
Claiming there's anything legally wrong with it, is like saying it's legally wrong for iTunes to sell music in their protected AAC format. If I buy a song from the iTunes Music Store, the file won't play on all of my computers and the media players I have on them. I see no legal responsibility for Apple to change that, it's their business model, and as a result they don't get any of my business.
The iPhone is tied into iTunes, and that's their product. As a consumer, you can purchase it or not.
I have been doing just that (installing software to the iPhone with the devkit) to test,
Not without paying Apple $99 for a key.