Open Sourcing an iPhone Application acceptable under the License Agreement?

Question

I've read through the licensing agreement, but I'm still not convinced either way. I want to make my iPhone application's source code available on the internet and set up a project page and SVN repository on a site such as Google Code. I wouldn't be distributing my signing keys and would be the single source for submitting the app to iTunes. Is this allowed under the License Agreement?

Answer 1

(Disclaimer: IANAL, I'm just a smart guy who's worked on GPL projects.)
That isn't the relevant part of the iPhone license agreement. The GPLv2 (which is probably the most important open source license for this question, as it's both very popular and has restrictions on mixing with proprietary code) does not encompass headers and libraries that are part of the operating system. That's how people can write open source Windows and Mac applications--believe me, Microsoft would not be pleased if someone contacted them and said that since Gaim was open source, they had to release the source code to the Win32 API. So the GPLv2 would not attempt to "annex" anything provided by Apple, and thus it wouldn't violate that section.
What may be relevant is the iPhone license section concerning confidentiality. If the class, method, function and constant names are considered "Apple Confidential Information", you would be in violation of the contract if you distributed code that revealed them. I rather suspect that nothing in the Foundation or Core Foundation frameworks could be considered confidential, as information about them is freely available to anyone who has the Mac OS X Core Library, which is distributed with every copy of Leopard. UIKit, Core Location, etc. are another story; I personally think that the fact that the APIs are included in the free SDK ought to preclude considering them confidential, but Apple might think differently.
In other words: you're definitely safe using LGPLv2 libraries. If the code would also compile with the Mac OS X SDK, you're almost certainly safe releasing it under the GPLv2*. If the code uses UIKit or other frameworks documented in the free SDK, you may be safe releasing it under the GPLv2. If you release any code that uses APIs that only licensed developers have access to under the GPLv2, you're probably totally screwed.
The GPLv3 is much stricter, and so the story there might be different; for example, I think it may have key-releasing requirements that would conflict with the contract. I don't really know much about it, though.
\* Remember, the original copyright holder can create alternate licensing arrangements for specific people. So he can say "anyone can use this code under the GPL, and as a special exception, it can be linked against FooCorp's non-GPL software". But to use anyone else's GPL code, you'd have to get all of the authors of that code to agree to the same exception. Alternately, you can just release your own code under the LGPL instead and then it's all good.
Message was edited by: Brent Royal-Gordon