NDA protect companies, every company I worked for or contracted for made me sign them, why would VEX release this to the public without an NDA?
Because VEX is supposed to be making an educational robotics platform, not a robotics platform with an artificially diminished potential for learning (however small the group that might truly take advantage of such a learning opportunity).
Granted, there are many valid reasons for VEX to restrict SDK access, but I feel, on principle, that they should not exercise this degree of secrecy about the SDK.
At the very least, I think VEX should publicize a reasonable subset of the SDK.
I’m not asking VEX to open source their SDK or anything, just to release the required binary and headers along with the associated documentation. I personally don’t see what VEX has to lose by releasing their SDK, the only additional information they would be releasing is the documentation on how to interface with VEXos. If someone really wanted, they could already extract the binary from RMS or PROS with just a little bit of work.