Coming as it does so soon after the announcement of the iPhone’s software roadmap, news of the device’s hacked, yet still unreleased, operating system has got to be embarrassing for Apple. Essentially it means the company has potentially lost control of the sole point of entry to the device through which it had hoped to vet third-party applications. And that means it has potentially lost control of the quality and nature of the apps that can be deployed on the iPhone.

That might give companies considering enterprise deployments of the iPhone pause. There’s a potential security issue there. Which isn’t to say that the iPhone is any more or less secure than any other mobile platform, just that from an administrative perspective, the devil you know is better than the one you don’t — even if the devil you know is Windows Mobile or the Blackberry OS. So in the end, I guess it’s sort of a “why bother” issue, with the perception that the iPhone is so easily hackable undermining its sales to enterprise.

One last thing: It’s my understanding that the SDK actually does contain a beta of the iPhone 2.0 firmware.

Thanks for trading words.

And how do you know that it’s not going to be easy for Apple to close the hole? Oh, I see, you’re just quoting the hacker who made the boast.

And isn’t the actual version of the software in the SDK 1.2, and not 2.0?