“The world of free software is full of amazing and even heroic
stories (the gcc toolkit for its quality and flexibility, Linux and
free desktops for their size and sheer ambition, Samba and Mono for
their tenacity at keeping up with confusing quasi-standards) but
one of my favorite recent stories is the opening of the iPhone.“Apple did a beautiful job creating this device. Millions wanted
it the moment it became known, and thousands wanted to write
programs to explore its ground-breaking interface elements. Apple,
however, failed to release its APIs, much less any toolkit or
run-time environment.“So the community built its own…”