Recently I picked up an iPhone and thought I should do a short post on development for the iPhone and how open source fits into all of this, if at all.
At the moment, there is no official SDK (software development kit) for the iPhone. All applications are supposed to be built for the iPhone's web browser and hosted remotely. This doesn't really leave any room for open source as most of the interesting code would be server side. Of course you can still open up the site on a mac and use the view source feature to see any HTML, CSS or JavaScript but this may not be properly licensed and may not be the whole app.
I did a little digging around on the internet and any mention of open source and the iPhone usually refers to the 'jail breaking' apps and the applications that can then be installed. As far as I've heard the most recent way to jail break your iPhone was using a TIFF overflow vulnerability, which I believe has now been closed with the release of firmware 1.1.2. This means that those apps will no longer be able to be installed onto the iPhone at this point.
Apple have come out and said officially that there will be an SDK available in February of next year. I believe this is the time when we will see official, open source iPhone applications.
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