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This should have been done when the App Store was launched. I guess it's better late than never though. I look forward to the online discussion and books that a

by kylec 18y ago

This should have been done when the App Store was launched. I guess it's better late than never though. I look forward to the online discussion and books that are certain to quickly emerge!

jcl 18y ago
I agree, but I can't help wonder why they didn't drop the NDA on launch. It was clearly an big issue for many people and actively hurting the platform, so it's not merely a matter of laziness or oversight. And I don't buy their "protecting trade secrets" argument at all; with the developer program opened as wide as it was, it would be trivial for a competitor to get wind of the "secret", which as far as I can tell is the Objective C API -- hardly something a competitor would be in a rush to implement, and likely similar to the existing non-NDA Mac OSX dev tools. There are only two reasons I can see for not dropping the NDA. One is that they didn't feel they needed to, believing that they owned the market, that dropping the NDA was an unnecessary concession of power, and that developer protests were largely symbolic. The other reason is that they were perhaps getting so many applications that their quality control system was inundated, so they were doing everything they could to impose barriers to development. In this case, perhaps we may see the $99 fee vanish in the next year, as well?
- mechanical_fish 18y ago
  Let me quote one of Gruber's correspondents, who had the take that made the most sense to me: It's a lawyer thing, which we m wouldn't understand. At my company, our lawyers advised us to keep what we considered more-or-less public software under NDA for a very long time because demoing software to someone under NDA, no matter how many people it is, avoids “publishing” the software and any inventions contained therein. We know Apple’s been building up a patent strategy around multi-touch; maybe their lawyers believe there are patentable inventions described in the iPhone SDK and they are telling Apple to keep everything under NDA until they know provisional patents can be filed within a reasonable amount of time (you get a year after publishing in the US, but in the EU, I think you forfeit any patent claims once your invention is “published”). It’s like, it doesn’t matter at all how broad/leaky the NDA process is, in the eyes of the USPTO, every invention in the iPhone SDK is a non-published invention and will continue to be so until the NDA is lifted. http://daringfireball.net/2008/08/iphone_nda_patents http://daringfireball.net/2008/08/iphone_nda_patents This take makes sense, because I agree that the NDA thing was otherwise completely self-defeating. It didn't actually protect any secrets and it certainly handicapped the developer community. Someone should check Apple's patent filings and see if the NDA is disappearing today because the lawyers finally finished up their provisional-patent work last week.
  - jcl 18y ago
    Thanks, that explanation makes the most sense of any I've heard or been able to come up with. It's a disappointing, though; the world really doesn't need more UI/software patents.

by kylec 18y ago

This should have been done when the App Store was launched. I guess it's better late than never though. I look forward to the online discussion and books that are certain to quickly emerge!

jcl 18y ago

I agree, but I can't help wonder why they didn't drop the NDA on launch. It was clearly an big issue for many people and actively hurting the platform, so it's not merely a matter of laziness or oversight. And I don't buy their "protecting trade secrets" argument at all; with the developer program opened as wide as it was, it would be trivial for a competitor to get wind of the "secret", which as far as I can tell is the Objective C API -- hardly something a competitor would be in a rush to implement, and likely similar to the existing non-NDA Mac OSX dev tools. There are only two reasons I can see for not dropping the NDA. One is that they didn't feel they needed to, believing that they owned the market, that dropping the NDA was an unnecessary concession of power, and that developer protests were largely symbolic. The other reason is that they were perhaps getting so many applications that their quality control system was inundated, so they were doing everything they could to impose barriers to development. In this case, perhaps we may see the $99 fee vanish in the next year, as well?

mechanical_fish 18y ago
Let me quote one of Gruber's correspondents, who had the take that made the most sense to me: It's a lawyer thing, which we m wouldn't understand. At my company, our lawyers advised us to keep what we considered more-or-less public software under NDA for a very long time because demoing software to someone under NDA, no matter how many people it is, avoids “publishing” the software and any inventions contained therein. We know Apple’s been building up a patent strategy around multi-touch; maybe their lawyers believe there are patentable inventions described in the iPhone SDK and they are telling Apple to keep everything under NDA until they know provisional patents can be filed within a reasonable amount of time (you get a year after publishing in the US, but in the EU, I think you forfeit any patent claims once your invention is “published”). It’s like, it doesn’t matter at all how broad/leaky the NDA process is, in the eyes of the USPTO, every invention in the iPhone SDK is a non-published invention and will continue to be so until the NDA is lifted. http://daringfireball.net/2008/08/iphone_nda_patents http://daringfireball.net/2008/08/iphone_nda_patents This take makes sense, because I agree that the NDA thing was otherwise completely self-defeating. It didn't actually protect any secrets and it certainly handicapped the developer community. Someone should check Apple's patent filings and see if the NDA is disappearing today because the lawyers finally finished up their provisional-patent work last week.
- jcl 18y ago
  Thanks, that explanation makes the most sense of any I've heard or been able to come up with. It's a disappointing, though; the world really doesn't need more UI/software patents.