iPhone owners, Apple shareholders score win against Apple and AT&T lawyers

In October, Apple relaxed iPhone SDK agreements to permit restricted discussion of development-related topics among registered developers, and to make room for books and other writings on the SDK. This policy change was oddly coincident, almost to the day, with Addison-Wesley’s publication of Erica Sadun’s “iPhone Developer’s Cookbook” (link goes to my review). Huzzah to Erica and to my old friends at A-W. Whether they forced change or exploited it, my compliments.

If developers weren’t already flouting Apple Law by mentoring one another and swapping code, App Store would be a dismal place instead of the deliciously bizarre bazaar into which it is maturing. Approving, while freshly restricting, behavior in which the populace is already engaged is a grace note that only Apple’s legal team could bring to the fostering of platform democracy. Don’t get me wrong — the world needs lawyers. You just have to keep them away from the artists. Lawyers leech creativity.

[ See InfoWorld’s special report: IT’s guide to the iPhone ]

I suggest that the lawyers in charge of iPhone Developer Relations lay out a road map for future loosening of the statutes that iPhone developers will ignore anyway, and to the delight of Apple shareholders. Coming months will see explicit freedom to discuss the SDK outside Apple’s cordoned forums, the establishment of open source project repositories and code exchanges, and the extension to all users the right to compile, install, and run open source and community-contributed software published on venues other than the App Store.

Seriously, Apple. iPhone’s popularity rides on the coattails of developers who are working for you, for free. The success iPhone has had to date is a mere taste of what you’ll experience if you cut developers loose. The bump in quality and quantity of apps that this one simple, grudging policy change will produce statistical evidence of this. You need to let the technical managers of the Developer Program (Macs), not lawyers, execs and wireless operators (PCs) gather and interpret that data and show you that in a competitive, high volume tech segment, democracy is more profitable than strict governance. If nothing else, the overhead’s a lot lower.