Iphone 3rd party development allowed...

[Tim Newsom]

OK.. We can't have it both ways guys.... Half the time we are talking 
about getting to the point where openmoko and neo1973 can get the phone 
companies to take notice and possibly bundle the phone with their 
service.. And the other half we're talking about how Apple could not 
have done the same thing.  The fact is we don't know other than some 
vague comments at the moment.

On the one hand, supposedly the iphone is based on osx (true or false?) 
which is based on BSD (true or false?).  BSD is a unix flavor right? So 
are they porting BSD to the phone similar to linux with openmoko?  If 
so... Why can't they just use a similar development environment to 
openmoko... I.e. Gcc for BSD?  Which flavor of BSD is it based on?

I am sure Jobs and company are not blind to the strength of open source 
software and the boon it would provide if they made a freely available 
dev kit for the phone.

Maybe its time to start thinking about other things that differentiate 
us from them... If they are open now (I.e. Not talking about being able 
to replace the os with a customized version though that may be one 
thing...), then it will be content, variety, availability and ease of 
use which drive consumer adoption... (From my point of view anyway).

--Tim

On Tue, 5 Jun 2007 17:35, kenneth marken wrote:
> Todd W wrote:
>> From: "Tim Newsom" <cephdon at gmail.com>
>>
>>> So apparently Jobs decided to allow 3rd party software on the phone 
>>> after all... Interesting development.
>> Yes, but how are they going to _support_ it?
>>
>
> or for that matter, how many hoops do you have to jump thru to get your 
> app onto the phone? i belive jobs at one time used the word "simple" to 
> talk about the kind of apps one would be allowed to make (or move from 
> osx to the phone iirc). so for all we know they are planing to make one 
> able to create something similar to dashboard widgets but not much 
> else.
>
> i just cant shake the feeling that the iphone will be a highly 
> controlled environment, with apple as the guardian.
>
> hell, they have partnered up with AT&T. and isnt mobile operators in 
> the US notorious for locking down what phones can or cant do? i recall 
> reading about bluetooth file transfer being removed and similar so that 
> one had to use their network to transfer data to and from the phone and 
> similar.