As has been mentioned, you are not going to get sound legal advice
on a
technical list. If you contact Apple's legal team/DTS, you are
going to get
legal advice that is in Apple's best interest, which may or may not be
helpful for your situation.
The problem is that I'm not getting any advice whatsoever from them
(which is why I sent this question to this list). I don't mind getting
a "no" (I'd prefer a "yes" to a "no", but also a "no" to no answer). I
just want to know where I stand and to what extent it is worth to
spend my time on Mac OS X/iPhone support (such as figuring out a way
to run our 4600+ regression tests on that thing without the ability to
remotely login).
Your best best is to speak to an independent
attorney who is familiar with software law.
The problem is not really software law. APIs have been ruled as
uncopyrighteable in the past (http://www.eetimes.com/news/design/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=201801579
). Since this header is however distributed as part of the iPhone SDK,
it's obviously subject to the terms of the iPhone SDK agreement (which
I accepted when I downloaded it). And that's basically a contract, and
that contract says that you cannot distribute derivative works based
on the SDK, except where the files are licensed under an open source/
free software license which does allow it (although I'm not sure
whether I'm even allowed to say this, because the contents of the
original NDA itself were also under NDA; I haven't checked whether
this condition was lifted together with the NDA on info in published
releases of the SDK).
But even if my hypothetical independent attorney could interpret that
agreement as allowing the distribution of a derivate of that header,
then if Apple's lawyers disagreed it would help me nothing (since I
sure as hell am not prepared for nor interested in a court battle with
Apple's legal department). An independent lawyer could at best tell me
whether there is a high or low chance whether Apple's lawyer would
agree with one or other interpretation. Which is not a great deal when
you consider that I do all this work for free.
The kicker is of course that in practice, Apple's legal department
probably couldn't care less about what I actually do in this case (and
all this whining will probably at most expedite a negative answer).
That's of course logical in a sense, as it's not like my work will
make or break Apple in any way; commercially, it only influences a
number of smaller Mac companies with (often legacy) Pascal code, and
some others that are porting Delphi/Win32 apps to Mac OS X.
Jonas
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