More on the iPhone NDA

Chuqui 3.0: iPhone NDA: Doing more harm than good:

This is stupid.

I can only think of two reasons the NDA is still in place

In the interest of fairness and not burying this in an update to a posting people won’t see, I wanted to note that I heard from someone I trust on this with another perspective:

there are companies that won’t download the SDK because they have to sign the NDA. If they sign it, they have liabilities.

If the NDA is lifted, the those companies have full access to that information.

That is an interesting angle, possibly obscure to some folks, but I see where it’s heading. Is it worth messing up all of the other developers? I still think there is a tradeoff here I don’t like.

She also goes on to note a couple of other things:

his has been the leakiest NDA that I’ve ever seen mind you… too many people think ‘hey, anyone can download it so f*ck the NDA’. and that’s just incredibly wrong.

well, the best way to handle that would be having a private mailing list/forum that ensures NDA covered participants only.

you’re probably way more familiar than I am about the internal issues there though.

The first one is a serious issue, and bluntly, the people who F*ck the NDA are a big part of the problem here — the abusers who violate it and leak stuff are a huge reason why Apple’s pushed so hard to clamp down on everyone. the honest geeks get screwed by the ones who play their games.

And for what it’s worth, Apple has at times run private lists and forums for beta/NDA setups. I used to run them on lists.apple.com (and its predecessors) as lists, and back in the mid-90′s I built a site around Web Crossing that ran private forums for various projects to support the nice Developer Support people.

The problem is that validation of NDAs and keeping the subscription up to list is somewhat labor intensive and honestly, a lot of project groups just weren’t that into it. It was sometimes a challenge to convince them they actually needed people monitoring the public lists (yet another time I almost got my butt fired, and would have gone willingly over that issue…), and so over time, the folks who thought this stuff was important more or less lost a war of attrition and it all faded to black. But there was a time from about the mid-90′s to the early 2000′s where a bunch of this stuff was going on behind the scenes, and the technologies exist there today to support it, if there were people willing to do the non-technical aspects of it.

But it has to be noted that the non-technical aspects of it aren’t trivial, so it’s not necessarily an easy call, especially for a large project like the iPhone.

But, you know? records of a developer’s NDAs do exist. And if you were to, say, move subscriptions to the customer database and interconnected it with the developer data, you could create a subscription system that knew what NDAs were active and showed what private lists could be subscribed to. Which sounds simple, but it took something like four years to finally get things like New Music Tuesday integrated… Speaking of times I almost got my butt fired…

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