libimobiledevice is a FOSS software library that talks the protocols to support iPhone ® and iPod Touch ® devices on Linux. Unlike other projects, it does not depend on using any existing proprietary libraries and does not require jailbreaking.

When we posted an article named "Ubuntu 10.04 supports iPhone / iPod Touch out of the box", it was actually libimobiledevice (and usbmuxd/gtkpod) who made this possible, not Ubuntu (thanks to Karl for mentioning this).

libimobiledevice (formerly known as libiphone) development started in 2007 and today it hits the first stable version: 1.0.0 and was followed by the release of usbmuxd 1.0.3. The result is that now you can say that in fact "Linux supports iPhone / iPod Touch out of the box!". Most distributions will feature the library in their next release. For now, the following have confirmed using libimobiledevice: Ubuntu Lucid (for Ubuntu Karmic, see THIS), Fedora 13, openSUSE 11.3 and Mandriva 2010.1.