Seriously. When anyone can get access to NDA-protected stuff just by coughing up $100, all the NDA really does is make it difficult for developers to share helpful knowledge.
This is true to a cosmic scale. The combined hours of duplicated effort by developers unable to share even the most basic of experiences and tips with various new components in the ios ecosystem is not only wasteful and short sighted, it's down right absurd. It makes me wonder if there is a way other than posting on the apple forums to share blog posts or code to persons confirmed to be apple iOS developers ( which by extension would be under nda ).
It's not sharing it with "outsiders" that's the issue. The problem is that the NDA limits you to being able to discuss these things with other developers on Apple's forums, and that is the only venue. And honestly Apple's forum isn't terribly helpful - the search sucks and the forum is full of noise.
Suppose a change in a new iOS version broke your app, and you wrestled with it for a weekend trying to fix it. How many other developers' weekends could you have saved, if only you were permitted to blog about the issue?
You can't write up examples of stuff using the new APIs, and post it on Github, or share at a local developer group meeting. So inexperienced developers can't learn from others.
It's not like the NDA is protecting things that would be truly damaging if disclosed, considering all it takes for them to pull aside the velvet rope is $100, and they've let both Google and Samsung in. The real secret stuff clearly goes to the blessed developers who get advance notice of things like the taller screen or GPU capabilities.
Probably because it's not really relevant? The point was about the $100 for the developer licence and the NDA that puts you under. Having a free option is neither here nor there because it doesn't give you access to the betas and it doesn't put you under NDA.
But it is relevant. If you can learn about all the confidential technologies like UICollectionView from free WWDC videos, then why is an NDA really necessary?