My iphone was stolen and u know I was not really to upset about it. I would have traded the operating system for windows. And if it had been possible then I would have been disappointed loosing it.

The problem, from my dual perspectives as a developer at a large company, and as the guy who runs a local Cocoaheads meeting, is the lack of a place to talk about the SDK as it stands today.

The iPhone SDK is probably the single most interesting topic to my attendees, and to my co-workers. A strict reading of the NDA implies that we still, sixish months after first ship and a month and a half after WWDC, cannot talk about how the SDK works. I cannot post sample code that takes a GData feed and renders it to the screen. We cannot bring up a ‘hey, did you see that” on cocoa-dev. Thus, bad coding, and bad ideas, stay out there, because nobody can give a logic check.

Apple can maintain control of the SDK with draconian warnings about future change, requiring everyone discussing it to put “I accept that things change” in iphone posts. Heck, they could require discussion to take place in a private forum, and they can prevent Apple people from posting officially. This would allow the developer community to push back against poor SDK usage, without putting Apple’s SDK at risk.

Today, we see a lot of tip calculators and ‘hold the button’ apps. Perhaps a more vibrant developer community able to share knowledge would give a wee bit of pushback to crap apps

Scott

Indeed, don’t read too much into the word choice – I really meant something more like “utopian” rather than moral per se. I’d correct it, but I don’t want to invalidate your comment, which I agree with.

I think when freetards (or people overcome with freetard thinking) talk about how “wrong” something is, or “immoral” they are often projecting a desire to use force to compel the rest of the world to act the way they prefer. I am certain that RMS would pass a law eliminating proprietary software in a minute if he could. And in doing so he’d be advocating blowing the brains out of any kid who wanted to keep the software he wrote to himself or trade it with people for money (and was willing to defend his right to not reveal the source code for his own creation.)

In short, I don’t think the freetards have the moral high ground. I haven’t seen anything to indicate that apple is violating anyone’s rights, and thus anyone who says apple’s actions are immoral (even re using DRM) is themselves either dishonest, or out of touch with morality.

I just won’t grant the the freetards the “moral highground”, as they don’t have it. (Though thisi s probably a quibble not worth as many words as I’ve given it.)

Basically, you go through all the (largely legitimate) complaints people have about iPhone development, and dismiss each one on the basis that there is probably a good reason for it, although you doesn’t actually know what that reason is.

Preventing people from discussing a public API is just ridiculous. Your theory that its somehow related to the fact that the API might change for 2.1 is a joke, ALL APIs change, yet other APIs don’t require this kind of enforced secrecy.

You claim that it “isn’t necessarily even a bad thing” that Apple is keeping some APIs secret, even though Microsoft has been eviscerated in the past for doing exactly the same thing.

Your argument that all of this is necessary because the device is a phone is also specious. Many phones, including the Blackberry, and most phones in Europe, allow the installation of third-party software without any of these restrictions, and without apparent problems.

You try to draw an analogy between the iTunes Store for Mac OS X and the App Store for the iPhone, pointing out that the former hasn’t hurt OSX. Um, duh, I’m not forced to go though the iTunes store to install third-party software on my Mac!

Basically your argument comes down to “Apple are a business, and anything they do is probably in the interests of their business, so its ok by me”. Funny how Apple is the only company on the planet that gets to use that defense (Microsoft, Exxon, Philip Morris…?).

When reducing DRM to “more DRM == worse usability == mistake,” I obviously ignored many important aspects of DRM. It was not my intention to write an exhaustive essay on the topic, I mainly wrote the post as an excuse for linking to Ash’s and Tsai’s posts. In doing so, I nonchalantly glanced over some things I probably should have mentioned, as you correctly point out.

I’ve linked to your post to add some additional color and balance to my own post.