Jailbreak iPod Touch?

I know programming, though I don't know Cocoa programming and Objective-C. But I still want to try to develop some programs on a iPod Touch. Good news is that the iPhone SDK is free to download. The bad news is, I found that if I want to use/test my application on iPod Touch, I need to join the standard iPhone Developer Program for US$99. It seems that the only way for me to deploy an application to the iPod Touch for free is to jailbreak it. Yet doing so may lose the warranty by Apple.

Perhaps I have been spoiled by many open-source software for some time. For example, the GNU/Linux is a free OS, along with many free applications like OpenOffice, GIMP, Firefox, etc, and the programming tools of Eclipse and Java. Now I have moved to a Mac OS X, perhaps I should accept that fact that I will soon become a slave to Apple. For example, if I want to sync my calendar to any handheld devices, the likely choice is a iPhone/iPod Touch. And then if I want to write any real iPhone applications, I have to pay Apple for distributing it through Apple store.

Well, I don't mind using Apple products. The MacBook, iPod Touch, OS X are great. They have some very nice features. In particular, I like the Spotlight and the Spotlight comment feature from Leopard, along with the backup functionality.

But Apple products also have some weakness. One is that the it has to pay for the software. And there is a major weakness of Leopard that it is slow, compared with Ubuntu, I believe. The startup time is ok, but when I launch a few applications like Mail, Calendar, Firefox just after startup, it can take a few minutes until the computer has proper response again! It didn't happen when I use Ubuntu on a much older notebook. Fortunately, the MacBook sleeps properly most of the time, so that I don't have to launch these applications everyday, except that after one or two weeks it may require a reboot due to some non-responding process (e.g. Finder!).

In short, I hope I can find a way to better utilize the Apple hardwares without paying extra money. And now I have to consider whether to jailbreak the iPod Touch......