Following Monday’s announcement of commercial sales of iPhone unlocking solutions, intrepid hackers have released a free method for unlocking the iPhone via software. The manual steps were originally released by the iPhone Dev Team, and have been verified to work by iLounge editor Jesse David Hollington. Following this release, a GUI application is in development that will greatly reduce the technical skill required to perform an unlock. After performing the unlock, the iPhone can be used with any SIM from any service provider.

Update: The GUI application originally linked in this story is actually the work of TUAW’s Erica Sadun. We have removed the link to the unfinished GUI application, as Erica, the true developer of the application, plans to release her work through the installer.app package manager for the iPhone once it is ready.