Originally Posted by
jkain:
“Pingu, you naive little penguin 
. Apple want people to use iTunes and the iTunes store and nothing else.”
But Apple (reportedly) make little profit on the iTunes store. However, their profit margin on iPods is as much as 50%.
Why would they
intentionally break compatibility on platforms such as Linux, and cut off that market completely for iPod sales?
The iPod revolves around a database file on the device, created by iTunes, which stores information about its content. Obviously the performance of the iPod OS is directly affected by how this data organised and laid out.
It's not surprising that changes are made to such a file when updates like this are released:
http://www.macrumors.com/2007/10/06/...-update-1-0-2/
Apple didn't do anything particularly special to stop anyone reverse engineering it; indeed many 3rd party applications (including Yamipod) currently work with the latest iPod firmware.
If Apple truly wished to stop this, they would introduce some form of encryption. (such as what they've done with iTunes's
DAAP protocol)