Yes, I know there are about a million blog posts about the iPhone 3G, and I'm sure there's no need for another. But, there have only been a few on the iPhone 3G and open source and free software. One of the few groups that have spoken out against the new iPhone 3G is the Free Software Foundation.
I haven't really blogged much about my personal experience with the iPhone so I'll give you a bit of background before I comment on the new phone and its relationship to open source.
I bought a first generation iPhone when it first came out in the UK. I was very happy with it for the first few months. I was even known to say that it was "the best phone I've ever owned."
After about the first four or five months I started to want more though. For me, the biggest thing it was lacking was games. It's great to have games on your phone so that you can occupy yourself, where ever you are. So I did a bit of research and downloaded Ziphone, with the intention of jail braking my phone. This turned out to be unbelievably easy. It took literally two clicks and a three minute wait and I was downloading fully open sourced games for the iPhone.
When the iPhone 3G was announced, I decided it wasn't for me. Edge is working just fine, so no need for 3G and GPS is also not a strong selling point. The only other thing was the app store, but on doing some research, I found that the Apple NDA that one has to sign to develop for the iPhone officially is in conflict with the GPL.
The bottom line is, if you sign the NDA, you can't disclose your source code. There are still some open source java applications out there of course and the iPhone dev team have already cracked the v2 software.
I'm personally waiting for Ziphone to update so that I can update my phone to 2.0 and instantly crack it to get the best of both worlds. For now, I'm happy with my v1 iPhone running a cracked version of 1.1.4.
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