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 compan

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.