Re: Wesnoth Apple App Store GPL violation?

Hi Rusty,
Since you are not currently actively involved in Wesnoth development, you
may not realize that there has been some discussion among the developers
already, in #wesnoth-dev IRC channel and several threads on the forums,
for example. The existence of iPhone development in particular was not a
secret and has been known for some time now.
However, I agree that this new FSF GPL issue should have been brought up
by now on the developer mailing list, and that was an oversight which I'm
glad has now been corrected. That was a mistake in my opinion. On the
other hand, discussing legal matters in a public format seems risky for
those who aren't legal experts, so maybe you can understand the wariness
involved?
Having said that, I really don't sympathize with your arguments. You
essentially are saying that you want Battle for Wesnoth to be used as a
tool in the "Freeness" war against Apple, regardless of the wishes of the
Lead Developer of Wesnoth, the active developers of Wesnoth, or
the Wesnoth userbase itself. To me that seems selfish, not selfless. If
you have a low opinion of Apple and their restrictive licenses, which I
know I certainly do, there are plenty of other ways to go about expressing
it. For example, we can use other hardware than the iPhone or use a
jail-broken iPhone.
Personally, I would never buy an iPhone for exactly this reason. However,
a lot of my friends have iPhones and aren't technically savvy enough to
load unapproved software onto them, yet I still want them to be able to
enjoy Wesnoth. To me, this is no different than the user with a slow
internet connection who is willing to spend a few dollars for a Wesnoth CD
in the mail, or perhaps a better analogy would be a paranoid user who
doesn't want to build Wesnoth for himself but is willing to pay for some
assurances that the person who built it didn't include any virus payload.
If Dave and the other developers and users really wanted to turn this game
into a Battle against Apple, then I would be OK with that. But since they
clearly don't, and this port was officially blessed from the beginning,
and there was plenty of time to object to it before (but you didn't), I
can't help but see this as anything more than a selfish move on your part
right now. If that is really your attitude then I look forward to seeing
your name struck out of the credits.
--
Patrick

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