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Patents to Blame for SDK NDA?

Cocoa developers obvious distaste for Apple’s iPhone SDK NDA has continued to be an on-going issue.

Set out to block all public mailing lists, blog posts and third-party reference manuals that would promote open collaboration, the NDA has done nothing but stifle developer’s creative freedom. I could only imagine the frustration that they are feeling.

So how does Apple even benefit from imposing this iron-clad NDA? That has been a question that I have been asking myself for quite some time now. Daring Fireball reader, ‘Jeb’, has provided a feasible explanation that would appear to hold elements of truth.

“At my company, our lawyers advised us to keep what we considered more-or-less public software under NDA for a very long time because demoing software to someone under NDA, no matter how many people it is, avoids “publishing” the software and any inventions contained therein. We know Apple’s been building up a patent strategy around multi-touch, maybe their lawyers believe there are patentable inventions described in the iPhone SDK and they are telling Apple to keep everything under NDA until they know provisional patents can be filed within a reasonable amount of time (you get a year after publishing in the US, but in the EU, I think you forfeit any patent claims once your invention is “published”).”

“It’s like, it doesn’t matter at all how broad/leaky the NDA process is, in the eyes of the USPTO, every invention in the iPhone SDK is a non-published invention and will continue to be so until the NDA is lifted.”

Not only do patents weigh down the entire software industry, but may be to blame for the NDA’s existence as well.