Ultimate irony

Posted Feb 20, 2009 11:34 UTC (Fri) by rickmoen (subscriber, #6943) [Link]

I'm not sure that the authors of the GPL would consider themselves an "Open Source License" as compared to a "Free Software License".

That and $1.50 will get you a ride on Muni. Even as a friend of Richard's, I'm not impressed at he and others at FSF spewing up clouds of rhetoric every time someone refers to one of their licences (or codebases) as "open source", when it is simply a fact that they are such (among other things that they are).

You're entirely right the iPhone is not friendly to GPLv3, but neither are all open source developers friendly to GPLv3.

This seems entirely and in fact flamboyantly irrelevant to the discussion, unless you can show that those "open source developers" are placing legal bars to anyone's development of GPLv3 software on an entire class of hardware devices. More to the point, Apple, Inc.'s legal restrictions appear to bar Registered iPhone Developers from releasing pretty much any iPhone application under any open source licence. Thus, for example, my observation about the SSH ports. I really don't think that's coincidence.

Your links as to SDK limitations were spot on accurate a year ago.

I'm unclear on whether you're saying that those various points about the SDK (and about the iPhone Developer Program License Agreement) are no longer applicable. Are you? Which ones? I'd be grateful to hear a rundown on the current situation -- with citations.

Now will Apple plunk people over the head with the DMCA? Who knows

Um, why don't you ask the PlayFair / JHymn developers? They have a long record on this matter, and it's not good -- without even counting their very recent, already infamous testimony before the Library of Congress DMCA regulations committee.

Like I mentioned, Apple did get the music labels to drop drm. Gotta give credit where credit is due.

I notice you keep changing the subject from what I spoke of, which was Apple's active measures to prevent third party development of open source apps on iPhones and iPod Touches (at least using the SDK). Now, you say there's been some... change? Improvement? It's "evolved", anyway, and I look forward to hearing what that means, specifically.

But, to address your gratuitously changed topic, yes, after making a ton of money retailing DRMed music tracks from the labels, they "got" some (hardly all of) the labels to allow them to make a ton more money selling upgrades to "iTunes Plus" variants of the same tracks, this time without the DRM. I expect that they did this not to save the world, but rather to increase shareholder value. So, if you're going to try to argue that they're on the side of the angels on account of one of their highly successful upgrade sales offers, you really should try that line, instead, on someone who can't read SEC reports. ;->

Rick Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com