This is an update from the MonoTouch team at Novell to the MonoTouch community.

Many have contacted us about reports on the changes in the iPhone Developer Program Agreement and while we can not comment on the specifics of a confidential agreement, we want to address some of the points that are being brought up.

We believe that MonoTouch brings an impressive value to the Apple ecosystem.

MonoTouch's C-powered runtime blends the power of native code and Apple's iPhoneOS APIs with type safety, automatic memory management, and other benefits that years of runtime innovation have delivered to the ISO Common Language Infrastructure.

We are reaching out to Apple for clarification on their intention, and believe there is plenty of room for course-correction prior to the final release of the 4.0 SDK.

MonoTouch's programming model exposes the iPhoneOS API to the C# language to give developers the same control and access that Objective-C developers get.

If Apple's motives are technical, or are intended to ensure the use of the Apple toolchain, MonoTouch should have little difficulty staying compliant with the terms of the SDK. MonoTouch runs only on Mac OS X, and integrates tightly with XCode and the iPhone SDK. Applications built with MonoTouch are native applications indistinguishable from other native applications, only expose Apple's documented APIs and uses a rigorous test suite to ensure that we conform to the iPhoneOS ABIs and APIs.

With this in mind, the MonoTouch team remains excited about the potential for Enterprise and AppStore-deployable applications developed for the iPhone and iPad. Support for iPhoneOS 4.0 on MonoTouch will be arriving soon.