Will the iPhone have open source SDK?

Probably not.

I reckon it would be Open Source apps yes. Open Source iPhone OS no.
Apple have to keep the platform safe or something…

The question needs clarifying. You probably don’t mean “will the source of the SDK be available for anyone to use in their own SDK” (of course the answer is no). Do you mean “Will someone be able to take the whole iPhone OS X system and extend it or port it to other hardware?”. Again, zero chance of that happening. If you mean “Will the apps people write be open source?” then the answer depends on the developer. It’s unlikely anyone could prevent me open sourcing my own application code, and I could let you use it as the basis of your own apps. Undoubtedly people will write routines and libraries for various things and open source them. Whether they will be available for installing on the iPhone however will likely be down to Apple, as the apps will be signed and possibly distributed through iTunes..

sharl covered it all but it might also be worth pointing out that often people confuse “open source” with “free” (like beer). While open source software can be free of charge, the converse isn’t always true. For example, the XCode tools that apple provides are basically free but their source is not open. What will likely happen is that Apple releases the iPhone SDK without charge but the source remains closed.

@sharl, I really hope that app depolyment doesn’t happen via iTunes – I would worry that Apple would have sole control over what is made available. The Installer.app package system is actually quite solid – Apple should take a hint and just improve upon that general idea since it has already proven effective.

@paulc: I agree. I would prefer simple Installers too, though I wouldn’t be surprised to see more restrictions initially, a la iPod games. I expect that sooner or later it’ll be much more open.

Thanks for your replies guys. I just wondering if the release of the any third-party application will be restricted to distribute their own source code.