little boxes made of words

1. On Thu, Apr 24 at 12pm,
   Jeff LaMarche said —

   You go Jens. :)

   I actually went on quite a tear on this same subject in my blog last week after one of the Apple Community Forum hosts deleted one of my posts in their developer forums where I did nothing more than tell another developer to “look again” for something they stated wasn’t included in the iPhone SDK but really is. I gave no technical information about where to look or how to use it, and the functionality I told them to “look again” for has been available in Cocoa for years, so clearly isn’t covered by the NDA. To add insult to injury, they sent this really condescending no-reply e-mail informing me of the moderation, and invited me not to participate if I don’t like their decision (I have stopped).

   Anyway, I have since deleted my blog post because, after re-reading it, I realized the way it was written wasn’t productive - it was a bit incendiary and expletive-laden. I shouldn’t have written it while still mad. But the points I made (similar to yours) are still valid, and I wondered why nobody else was complaining or commenting on the fact that the use of an NDA here defies all common sense and probably isn’t een legally enforceable. NDAs are designed to protect trade secrets; obviously the material in the iPhone SDK ISN’T a trade secret, since anyone in the world with a valid e-mail address can get it without approval or authorization. I guarantee you that all of Apple’s competitors have access to the SDK. Since Apple is not even making minimal attempts to protect this “trade secret”, it’s unlikely they could enforce their NDA in any legal forum. Unfortunately, they certainly can still deny membership in the iPhone developer program, which is, I think, why everybody’s so sheepish and obedient :(

   These forums here have been allowing some amount of peer support to go on, but a lot of people are scared of jeopardizing their Golden Ticket that will allow them to run programs on their iPhone, a process which has been slow and somewhat arbitrary.
2. On Thu, Apr 24 at 1pm,
   Manton Reece said —

   I agree. In the context of the hundreds of thousands of downloads of the SDK, the NDA is silly. I’ve blogged on the same topic, and at this point I think it’s in everyone’s best interest to actively ignore it.
3. On Thu, Apr 24 at 2pm,
   mcormier said —

   It’s the same story if you get pre-releases of the operating system if you are a paid member of the developer network and it’s a strategy for controlling information.

   They expect the SDK to be unstable and are trying to prevent a bunch of information that will be outdated quickly from being posted on the web, where it will permeate and take forever to disappear.

   Personally I’m not doing any iPhone development, so I’m quite surprised to hear that Apple aren’t providing at least a mailing list. Sucks to be you. I’ll wait until all the iPhone hoopla dies down before considering development on the platform.
4. On Thu, Apr 24 at 3pm,
   Chris Adams said —

   This has been an endemic problem in other areas, too - almost everyone in the IT community has been asking for an NDA-only forum so we can avoid time finding, reproducing and reporting bugs which are already known/patched. The other problem is the inside/outside distinction: there have been many bugs in the past which affected many people (often causing problems for Mac purchases) but until they were reported in copy-and-pasteable detail nobody at Apple would seriously attempt to reproduce them; it’d be great if there was a “we’re on your side” list where Apple engineers could openly work with the community to narrow down some of these bugs rather than treating everything as opaque, independent cases.
5. On Thu, Apr 24 at 3pm,
   Jeff LaMarche said —

   it’d be great if there was a “we’re on your side” list where Apple engineers could openly work with the community to narrow down some of these bugs rather than treating everything as opaque, independent cases.

   Yes, it would would be great, but I think most of us would be thrilled just with a place where we could “talk amongst ourselves” and provide peer support to each other. Support from the engineers would be an added bonus, but this inability to help each other out in any kind of forum or mailing list is a real killer.

   And I don’t want any of this to come across as a slight against the engineers and developers at Apple - there’s a whole bunch of them who are as helpful as they can be without getting in trouble. They’re in no better of a position than we are, and worse, because they can lose their jobs for crossing the line.
6. On Thu, Apr 24 at 3pm,
   Chris Adams said —

   I’ll second Jeff’s comment: I’ve talked with Apple developers privately for certain problems and I definitely do not think any of this is their doing. It’s a managerial decision and it needs to change at the top because currently it’s easier for someone not to risk their job saying too much in public.
7. On Sun, Apr 27 at 4pm,
   Greg said —

   I think mcormier covered it pretty well above. The API is still in flux. The SDK and simulator are still bleeding-edge-beta. Things crash. Other things don’t actually work yet. If someone figures out a way around a bug by calling something that doesn’t exist in the next beta, but that workaround becomes public knowledge, that could lead people down the wrong path for a long time. Apple needs people banging on the system to figure out what is confusing and broken, so they have the beta program. Until it’s been hammered into shape, though, any information that would make it onto a mailing list (which is likely to be archived) is misinformation for the future.
8. On Sun, Apr 27 at 7pm,
   Jeff LaMarche said —

   The API is still in flux. The SDK and simulator are still bleeding-edge-beta. Things crash.

   Things crash sure. Everybody expects that. Having the a place where people who are using the API to discuss the API is not going to make things crash more, and might help some people figure out why things are crashing and provide better bug reports to argument.

   If someone figures out a way around a bug by calling something that doesn’t exist in the next beta, but that workaround becomes public knowledge, that could lead people down the wrong path for a long time.

   Which is better than going down no path because you have no way to work around a bug. We can’t work with and test the API if we we get stuck on something. This is such a weak, apologist’s argument, it’s hard to take seriously. “People might share bad information, so we should keep them all in silos and threaten them with a beating if they talk about this stuff we want them to use and test”… puh-lease. If they were really scared of that, they shouldn’t have done a public beta. See that word? Public? It’s out there, we’re using it. They want us to use it. They are touting the fact that so many of us ARE using it.

   Anybody with a valid e-mail address can download it, read the documentation and use it, but somehow if we talk about it, it’s going to make matters so much worse down the line we need to be stopped?

   C’mon. That’s not logic, it’s rationalization.
9. On Tue, Apr 29 at 9am,
   nate said —

   And if they’re really that concerned about longevity/indexing/etc., they already have a solution in place: the iPhone development center itself requires a login to get to any documentation, and Googling for anything past that comes up empty. So they could drop a forum on the other side of that wall — everyone who’s in there has already “signed” the “NDA,” so it would preempt the other outside discussion that we’d like to have.
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