Jobs, The Jerkoff, relents, but is it enough?

Yesterday, Steve Jobs announced that his company will release a software development kit (SDK) for the iPhone in February. Today comes word from the Paris-based International Herald Tribune that Apple has struck a deal in France with Orange, a division of France Telecom, to sell officially unlocked iPhones.

Apple was forced to make the move because French law forbids telecom service providers from tying handsets exclusively to their networks; the law continues to insist that cellphone users can move to a different service provider and take their phones with them. So Orange will sell two iPhones: a locked model, and an unlocked model.

One catch with the unlocked iPhone is that buyers must prove they live in France. Another catch is that it will be more expensive than the hefty $560 (U.S.) Apple plans to charge French customers for the locked version.

Meanwhile, Apple has signed deals that resemble the exclusive one it made with AT&T in the United States with companies that do not operate under French laws: O2 in Britain, the wireless division of Spain's Telefonica, and Germany's T-Mobile, a subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom.

It must have galled Jobs, a notorious control freak, to loosen his grip on the iPhone innards. I can understand some of his reluctance to delay the SDK, which could leave an Apple product vulnerable to hackers and virus makers. Apple has, after all, managed to stay afloat on a reputation that its products are almost impervious of viruses, worms and various other villainies.

It’s an enviable record, and if Jobs credits his reluctance to lift the lid on his products as the reason for that record, then it will be hard to dissuade him.

There are two thoughts that come to mind in light of these events.

First, that the United States has lagged behind Europe in its attitude toward business. Under the guise of not interfering with the marketplace, U.S. lawmakers have backed off corporate restrictions to protect consumers. And guess what? Corporations have seized the bit and are heading furiously toward monopolistic practices. In high tech, that has resulted in the arrogance of Microsoft, which thought that the European Union would collapse as easily as Washington did before the gods of free enterprise, but got soundly slapped around by the EU anti-trust forces; the same mule-headedness forced Apple to decide whether to maintain its control of the iPhone and kiss the French market goodbye, or to relent and offer an unlocked version to comply with French law.

The kind of pro-consumer hardball played by the EU and France is actually forcing companies to give competitors a level playing field. Laying off corporate greed is not the way to encourage competition, despite what Washington has come to believe.

Second, it’s really astonishing that Apple wanted to protect its mobile operating system from application developers, even for the first few months, when companies such as Microsoft have clearly shown that the more access you give developers, the stronger the product becomes.

Soon, Google is rumoured to release its hush-hush mobile GPhone with an open-source operating system, Skype is rumoured to be considering its own competitive product, and FIC has announced it will release its Neo1973, which runs on the OpenMoko Open Source operating system.

What’s common to these competitors is that they’re all using open-source software. Soon, the iPhone will be swamped by serious competition.

No doubt the Apple iPhone will still look better — no one can match Apple’s design team — but the damage has been done: Apple is behaving like a stodgy manufacturer desperately hanging on to its product and trying to control the way you use it and the way you buy it.

It won't wash.

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