well, I'm not saying 'anything goes', but frankly, Apple made the iPhone and Apple decided to allow third parties to develop apps for it. You could use this phrasing to apply to anything, like businesses which decide proper attire and behavior for customers or dance clubs which decide who's good enough to come in and who has to wait in line.

I think Apple has demonstrated that it is not being 'jealous and arbitrary'. There have been a few isolated instances of apps which seemed to be 'arbitrarily' rejected, like the app related to health care reform which listed congressmen and senators and their contact info.

Well, don't co-mingle your code then, easy enough.

And you only have to release any code changes you make if you make your changes public. If you keep them private (to yourself or even within a company), you do not have to publish your changes.

BTW, the whole point of this is to prevent someone (cough - Microsoft - cough) from using the work of others and use it for their own gain without giving back. You know, like how people got all up in arms when CDDB, after the public filled their databases with music information, just turned around and went private on them. Or when EFI-X took the code from the hackintosh community, stuck it on a flash card, and sold it as a 'new' invention for booting a PC with OS X.

...I stopped supporting the EFF, both financially and philosophically. At one point, they have become the Greenpeace of the Open Source movement, and now they are no better attention whores than the jesus sandal wearing treehuggers.

...is that it takes a FIA request in order to actually be able to talk about the Developer license.

Also, on this note:

The group does acknowledge that the terms are not uncommon for end-user agreements, but also points out that they apply to over 100,000 developers.

Bear in mind that while these terms might be usual for 'end-user' agreements, end-user agreements don't usually apply to non-end-users. But they need to include this to make sure someone doesn't try to sue Apple for anything store related (otherwise a bunch of developers would be suing them for denying their apps, etc).

NDA contracts are fairly standard between businesses - the problem is that a lot of iPhone developers aren't 'businesses' but individual developers with very different expectations of how things work - particularly when you've come from an 'open' platform (I'm including Windows and desktop OS X as 'open', although NDA does still tend to apply on forthcoming releases).

Notably you find far less of these kind of complaints from games developers, because they tend to be coming from a world where NDA agreements with console manufacturers and SDK licences are normal.

And amusingly "Developers, including government agencies such as NASA, cannot make public statements about the iPhone OS developer agreement" - except that a lot of them have . . .

you don't talk about fight club....or the SDK.

This is precisely why the EFF is an important organization. Who else is thinking about, and highlighting how laws and procedures relating to technology impact society?

It's ridiculous to say its legal for Apple to implement their procedures, as a kind of approval for all things-Apple, and then complain about the EFF for highlighting Apple's actions.

The last I heard the Freedom of Information Act is a law, so is the right to discuss these matters, codified into the constitution. The EFF is only following those same laws.

Apple can survive someone discussing their behavior.

If you can't tolerate this, just what exactly are you capable of tolerating?

NDA contracts are fairly standard between businesses - the problem is that a lot of iPhone developers aren't 'businesses' but individual developers with very different expectations of how things work...
Notably you find far less of these kind of complaints from games developers, because they tend to be coming from a world where NDA agreements with console manufacturers and SDK licences are normal.

Except there's a difference. NDAs are usually put in place before the public announcement. But they don't hold after that. And the NDA usually covers trade secret type stuff, like the hardware itself, possibly the SDK. But saying that the license itself is considered a 'trade secret' is stretching things immensely, and why the EFF called Apple a 'feudal lord'. They don't just want to control what goes on the iPhone, they want to control everything related to the iPhone.

h***, it makes one wonder if Apple has their lawyers trying to come up with a way to put in the EULA that all users must say iPhone and not 'cell phone' or 'phone' when talking about the device.

And if you recall, Apple's initial License even forbade developers from even talking about the SDK to other developers, which meant you couldn't ask questions, even on an Apple developer or internal message board. This was something that made sense before the SDK went public, but took Apple a long time to finally change.