Is there more to VLC's removal from the App Store? | Hacker News Reader

Is there more to VLC's removal from the App Store?

tuaw.com

9 pointsst3fan16 comments

That article, and most of its reader comments, mildly sickens me. I love Apple, but that doesn't mean I have to approve of DRM. It's crazy to see everyone piling on Rémi when Apple made the decision to use DRM and thereby exclude a whole category of OSS projects. A license is a license, and if DRM is prohibited, there's not much wiggle room. I feel sorry for Rémi, as he'll probably now be subjected to dozens of misguided angry emails.

Yeah, what a strategically brilliant move: fight DRM by removing one of the most popular and full-featured players of unencumbered content from the hands of users.

Because nothing sells DRM-free content like making it more difficult to play.

And it goes without saying that the sight of a single developer torpedoing a popular project over the objections of both other developers and users is an awesome commercial for open source.

If there is a problem with the license, pretending otherwise doesn't seem very sustainable to me. Shooting the messenger might make the mob feel better, but that doesn't make it justified.

Both the GPL and VLC were around long before Apple's store. The developer contributed to a project that had a very clear, existing copyrights and Apple chose not to honour that. Simple as that.

And yes, seeing apple fanboys jump on this guy because he wants his rights honoured is pretty sickening.

You can have all the right in the world and still be an ahole.

One man's asshole is another man's hero. Who are you to judge him?

Obviously the "one man" in your opening sentence. Duh!

> a single developer torpedoing a popular project over the objections of both other developers and users

So, your point is that developers should only enforce their rights when it will be popular?

I was singularly unimpressed by the blog author's focus on blaming the developer for making things inconvenient for others. Well, insisting on your rights is quite often inconvenient for others. And it's not like it should be surprising. This sort of conflict was inevitable given the terms of the App Store and the GPL.

And it goes without saying that the sight of a single developer torpedoing a popular project over the objections of both other developers and users is an awesome commercial for open source.

It doesn't seem like VLC requires copyright assignment. If it did then the maintainers could implicitly or explicitly relicense VLC for the app store. Since Remi holds the copyright to whatever source code he wrote, he has a right to see that the source code isn't used against his wishes. Maybe he has a philosophical objection to Apple or the app store. Maybe he's just doing it "for the lulz". Whatever it is, it's honestly none of anyone else's business.

And that article is terribly one-sided. The only facts that matter are that Remi holds the copyright to some of VLC's source code and that the app store ToS is possibly incompatible with the GPL. Anything else (motives, etc) is a value judgement.

This has nothing to do with DRM. Apple's DRM is compatible with GPLv2.

The article is very critical of Rémi Denis-Courmont, but isn't it Apple's own fault in the end? They're the ones who decided to make the App Store license incompatible with the GPL.

Is it necessarily incompatible? Do the terms of service of the App store prevent the source code of the VLC iOS app from being redistributed freely? (If not, then anyone with a copy of XCode and an iOS device could compile and install it on their own device, and with an iOS developer license would be free to install on others. And in principle to make and distribute derivative works.) As RMS has frequently noted, the GPL doesn't prevent anyone from charging money for binaries of GPL'd code -- it just requires them to permit redistribution of the source.

> Do the terms of service of the App store prevent the source code of the VLC iOS app from being redistributed freely?

GPL is not about source access. Source access is an implementation detail in order to achieve the aims of GPL.

What the GPL is about is ensuring that the following three things apply to every user of the software:

    They are free to run the software, for any purpose.

    They are free to study how it works, and to make changes to
    it. (GPL requires source availability because source is necessary
    to reasonably do this).

    They are free to give away copies of the software (the original
    or their modified version), as source or binaries.

To achieve this for every user, it is necessary for the GPL to disallow distributors of GPL software from contractually or otherwise making recipients agree to refrain from doing the above things.

The problem with the App Store and GPL is that the TOS for the App Store requires the recipient to contractually agree to not do some of the above things.

The problem isn't with the source code but with the binary. The GPL doesn't allow additional restrictions on what the user can do with it after getting it, whether it was paid for or not. That's what the developer filed the complaint over.

" They're the ones who decided to make the App Store license incompatible with the GPL."

No. It's the fault of whoever submitted an app covered by an incompatible license. Apple didn't change their terms after the fact to exclude GPL.

They actually made a bunch of changes to make the App Store more compatible with the GPL.

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