America for Sale. All your software in one nice little burrito | AppSumo.com. FORTUNE: Apple 2.0 Reports: Apple Set to Open Up the iPhone (Within Limits) « Apple (AAPL) won no friends among the developers of third-party iPhone applications -- or the users who downloaded them -- when it wiped them all out with software update 1.1.1. But with the release of Leopard (the next major upgrade of the company's flagship Macintosh operating system) only three weeks away, there are signs that Steve Jobs may be set to open the iPhone up to outside programmers -- or at least those who agree to obey his rules. The iPhone was open to third-party software from day one, of course, as long as coders stuck to writing within the confines of the Safari development environment and didn't try to write so-called "native" apps -- a restriction that some hackers took as an invitation to crack the thing open on their own terms.
Now Cleeve Nettles of 9to5Mac, an Apple rumor site with a pretty good iPhone track record, reports on a burst of behind-the-scenes activity in Cupertino involving a chosen group of developers with close ties to the company. He writes: Freemacware.com : Freeware (free software) for Mac OS X. FreewareOSX - Freeware software for Apple Macs.