Phone SDK NDA DOA

Apple has finally realized that blocking open collaboration among iPhone developers may not be the best approach to iPhone application development. And so this morning, the company dropped the nondisclosure agreement with which it had hamstrung developers by prohibiting them from discussing iPhone programming and caused no end of consternation in the iPhone dev community.

“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,” Apple (AAPL) explained in a statement posted to its Developer Program site. “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.”