Apple has announced that it will drop the portion of its non-disclosure agreement (NDA) for released iPhone software. A statement posted to the company’s iPhone developer website reads, “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.”
It continues, “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.” It is unclear exactly what Apple means by “unreleased software and features,” however, the NDA may continue to cover only pre-release Apple software, seeded to developers but not yet released to the public, while all features and nuances of publicly-available software would not be covered. Alternately, the NDA may continue to cover unreleased third-party software, which would create further issues for developers.
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