EFF Uses NASA to Out iPhone SDK License Agreement
The Electronic Freedom Foundation (EFF) petitioned NASA (an iPhone developer – iTunes link) under the Freedom of Information Act to provide them with a copy of Apple’s iPhone SDK License Agreement, and have gone through and provided both a link to the agreement (an older version, provided at the time of the request) and some analysis of what it contains.
For those not familiar with the document, it contains the legal terms a developer must agree to before they can develop for the iPhone platform. Since the EFF and Apple have been duking it out over Jailbreaking for a while now — the EFF wants Jailbreaking to be made an official exception to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and Apple has opposed that move — the EFF thinks the SDK agreement is particularly interesting at the moment.
The major points brought out and up by the EFF include:
- One rule of the SDK license agreement is you can’t talk about the SDK license agreement. Despite it not being “Apple confidential information” developers are contractually prohibited from discussing it in public.
- Apps developed using the SDK can only be released through the iTunes App Store. So if Apple rejects you for any reason, according to their own guidelines or just on whim, you can’t release via Jailbreak or on a competing platform (if any were compatible).
- No reverse engineering or helping others reverse engineer, even where such actions have legal precedent as exceptions to copyright.
- No hacking or helping hack any Apple products. That means no Jailbreaking the iPhone, no putting Boxee on your AppleTV, no loading Linux on your iPod Classic.
- Kill switch is informed in the agreement. Apple can revoke your certificate at any time. (Though they’ve yet to ever do this).
- If Apple messes up and owes a developer damages, those damages will never exceed $50, so good luck suing for millions over your rejected Sexy App or RSS Template.
The EFF is none to pleased at the one-sided, gate-kept, stifling terms of the SDK Licensing agreement and good for them. And good for us as well. The way we look at it we need the opposing forces of Apple Legal and the EFF always pushing for more on both sides. Apple’s going to want to protect themselves as much as possible and the EFF is going to want to show us every way they’re doing it so if we don’t like it, we can voice our concerns as well.
We’ve used the analogy of restaurants before. The iPhone is Apple’s boutique, haut-cuisine eatery. They set the menu. You can’t go there, demand a burger, and then throw a fit when they tell you they don’t serve it. (Well you can, but you’d be nuts — Apple’s not in the business of serving burgers). Instead of Gordon Ramsey you get Steve Jobs crafting your dining experience, and if you go there, that’s what you should expect — to trade control for ease of use (as opposed to Google where you trade privacy for free service). However, the EFF making sure the ingredients are what we’re told they are, and that the kitchen is kept clean and compliant with local ordinances — that’s good for us, and ultimate it’s good for Apple.
Check out the EFF article, take a look at the agreement, and let us know what you think.
[Thanks to Fassy for the tip!]
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So maybe this will cause things to change and in return we will see better APPS that are useful or at least well designed.
To continue your analogy, Jobs is not only crafting the dining experience, he is telling the chefs what they can and cannot cook – or, more specifically, he is telling them to buy their own ingredients, hire their own sous-chefs, prepare the meal, and THEN he will decide if the customer can even see it, without any obligation to explaining why the dish cannot go out, or how to fix it, if he rejects it. He can even take your food off of paid customer tables, at his sole whim. And, if you have a problem with the kitchen manager, the most you can pursue is the busboy’s share of the tip.
Yeah, yeah – it’s Apple’s fantastic kitchen, they can set whatever rules they want, and, if you do not like them, cook somewhere else. No duh – that is the problem. Eventually, they will.
The iPhone is nothing like a resturant. The only way that analogy works is if you have to purchase a table, dish, glass, and silverware. The way the app store works is more like if Toyota (or any other auto manufacturer) required you to only use mobile gasoline.
Well yeah that’s the difference between controlled and open platform. Control is more like a dictator and open is more like dimocracy which we as Americans haven’t seen in a long @$$ time! So Jobs just wants the best experince for apple uses as possible without sacrafice to the performance of the product. The iPhone is the best qaulity phone I have ever had. So I am willing to give up customizing for performance any day. And that’s basicly the only thing people bitch about on the iPhone when it comes down to it is customizing it. There is pro’s and con’s to everything. Even google.
Very clever way of getting the document published.
But the critics, duh? What do you expect.
@Dev — Yep, “it’s Apple’s fantastic kitchen, they can set whatever rules they want, and, if you do not like them, cook somewhere else. No duh – that is the problem.”. Our only disagreement is that I don’t see how it’s a problem. Sure, if I agree to these rules and then don’t want to abide by them, it’s a problem for me, and maybe this is a mild PR problem for Apple . . . is that what you meant?
Yawn…yawn…yawn…yawn…yawn.
I see nothing in this agreement that wouldn’t be expected when you are entering a distribution agreement with an exclusive distributor. It may look harsh to the uninitiated but if you have ever signed a contract there isn’t much here to surprise you.
Re “that’s good for us, and ultimate it’s good for Apple”… not really. It’s a nice platitude but without real merit. Apple does not and will not craft its contractual agreements based on popular opinion. Nor should it. Publishing the License Agreement accomplishes nothing but to generate publicity for the EFF (their main motive) and titillate the public with a document they wouldn’t otherwise see. Make a difference? Not a chance.
@Lady Kaede
No, abiding by the rules is not a problem — I mean it is a problem because such a deathgrip on rules is itself ultimately self-defeating. The 1980s parallel with the Mac is instructive, in that the Windows only became an insurmountable juggernaut when the coolest apps became Windows-first or Windows-only, and that only occurred because Apple treated developers with something between indifference and hostility. Consequently, many shops bolted at first opportunity. Windows might have still snowballed, but Apple would have been in a much better position to fight off their near-death had they kept some of those killer apps from leaving.
With the iPhone’s huge marketshare lead, it is not a short-term problem at all — the Mac did not suffer for 4 years, and I doubt Apple will feel significant effects for a couple years. Some will cite the few early defections and repercussions (e.g. Joe Hewitt and the botched Facebook 3.1 release) from the more philosophically opposed, but for most of us, it is pure business. On one side of my scale is Apple’s unquestioned market superiority; on the other side are App Store policies that introduce significant expense and completely unforeseeable risk to my business. If I can net $250,000 from the iPhone, with a 5% risk of rejection and total loss versus a best case of $15,000 from the Android market, I will choose the iPhone market every time. Since Apple’s policies allow me to little more than guess for that 5%, if and when my projections for the Android market grows to $100,000, the decision is not so clear. If the iPhone gave me a way to run my business rationally with regard to risk, I would never look the other way, and I know I am not alone in that regard.
Good third party apps are the best salesforce a platform has. Apple has a deserved lead, but the unquantifiable headaches the App Store introduces tilts that salesforce towards the competition. As DaringFireball put it “There are awesome iPhone OS apps that aren’t being built because developers don’t trust Apple not to yank the carpet out from underneath them.” That is not an attitude any company can afford to cultivate among your salesforce or your community if you want to maintain your edge. All it will take is a few of those “awesome apps” showing up first on Android, or webOS, or Windows-whatever-the-hell-it-these-days, and the landscape can change.
I do not want to see what happened to my Mac happen to my iPhone, and draconian terms like these sow the eventual seeds of that scenario.
THAT is the problem.
@Dev – Bravo and thank you! I’ve got no serious argument with the history you present, and I respect and am happy to have your opinion. I agree 100% Apple drove Mac developers away. But that wasn’t today’s Apple anymore than today’s Microsoft is the Microsoft that bought competing companies in 1 in order to kill them.
Still, the risk/reward/hassle scenario you paint isjust plaintrie, and the best descrition of it I’ve read (yes- not joking) – so I hope you won’t just thinkme a smart-ass when I say
. . . Please create one of those ‘awesome apps’ that are onthe Nexus One but not available for iPhone so that everyone can see clearly the truth of what you are saying.
Sorry for the hideous typography – in a moving vehicle ( NOT driving).
@Lady Kaede
No, the Apple of today is not the Apple of yesterday — in terms of how it treats developers, the rules and support are far worse than for the Mac back in the day. (Though their actual tools are admittedly much better, IMHO)
As for the rest, no worries, I appreciate the discussion and do not think you are just being a smartass. However, even if I had one of those “awesome apps” (Gruber’s words, not mine) kicking around my brainpan, I do not think the NexusOne is there yet, either in terms of its hardware or its market. That is why I do not think Apple’s policies are going to hurt them in the short run at all. While the competition is floundering, this is Apple’s wild summer, and they certainly should feel entitled to enjoy it.
But a smart business should not be the grasshopper who acts as if the summer should never end; the smart business needs to account for circumstances changing. At least in its treatment of its third party developers, Apple is acting the grasshopper, assuming partners need the iPhone market so badly they will put up with comically one-sided rules, forever. Today, it is true. Tomorrow, it will still be true. But if they keep squeezing this tightly, sooner or later (probably later) it will catch up to them.
If the EFF has such a problem with Apple’s closed model, why not just promote the Droid?
Nice of them to stick their hands where they don’t belong.
@iPaladin
The EFF does not “promote” anybody or anything — that would bias them and completely torpedo their mission, which is to act as a neutral watchdog for citizen’s choice and freedom online. Apple, Google, Verizon, AT&T, the FCC — the EFF treats them all equally. (30 seconds on a search engine will show you examples of the EFF challenging each of them.) Regardless of the entity involved, the EFF exists solely to speak up when they see a government or corporate action that abridges citizen/consumer digital freedoms. Nothing more, nothing less.
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