Slashdot Mirror
Apple Drops Part of iPhone Developer NDA
ds writes "Apple, this morning, announced they are dropping the iPhone Developer NDA in respect to released software. Previously, iPhone developers were legally bound even after their software had been released."
Another reader adds, "Early release software is still covered, but this should bring about increased developer interaction, as well as a slew of iPhone dev books." The complete message about the NDA change can be seen for now at Apple's iPhone Developer site, and is reproduced below.
"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."
Yes.
You write code. You can talk about that code. But if that code is based on somebody else's code, and that somebody else has that code under NDA, and your code implies information about their code, then you have to keep it under wraps.
More concretely, Apple's NDA cannot prevent you from discussing your own code. But if your code contains information about the iPhone code, you can't discuss that.
Now that things are being lifted, you can discuss the iPhone code and therefore your own code which relies on it. The only remaining restriction is that you can't talk about iPhone code which isn't public yet, and by implication any of your own code which relies on the non-public changes.
So this change covers only their prerelease software, and by extension any of your software which contains information about their prerelease software. But it doesn't, and can't, cover your own prerelease software by itself.
If you mod me Overrated, you are admitting that you have no penis.
We mac developers were led to believe that by WWDC, we'd have an SDK with a lifted NDA. Nope. Didn't happen.
We mac developers were led to believe that by July 11 when the iPhone 3G was released, we'd have an SDK with a lifted NDA. Nope. Didn't happen.
Now they tell us that the NDA will be lifted at some point in the near future. What's changed?