--- On Tue, 8/10/10, Hans-Christoph Steiner hans@at.or.at wrote:
From: Hans-Christoph Steiner hans@at.or.at Subject: GPL vs. iPhone Appstore WAS: pd on ipad with externals To: "Jonathan Wilkes" jancsika@yahoo.com Cc: pd-list@iem.at, "Frank Barknecht" fbar@footils.org Date: Tuesday, August 10, 2010, 6:39 PM
On Aug 10, 2010, at 12:25 PM, Jonathan Wilkes wrote:
--- On Tue, 8/10/10, Frank Barknecht fbar@footils.org
wrote:
From: Frank Barknecht fbar@footils.org Subject: Re: [PD] pd on ipad with externals To: pd-list@iem.at Date: Tuesday, August 10, 2010, 12:53 PM Hi,
On Tue, Aug 10, 2010 at 11:07:55AM +0100, João
Pais
wrote:
but to make patches run, they have to be
programmed in
vanilla,
right? and it's not possible to do reatime
control
like input
numbers, or anything more than the touchpad
control?
or is it possible to use pd-ext in the iphone
or ipod
maxi?
As Cyrille wrote, it's mostly a political issue:
AppStore
apps are tied to the device and officially only available
through
the AppStore. This is some kind of DRM and many people don't
consider it
compatible with the GPL, at least not with the latest
version.
More specifically, the FSF considers the GPL
incompatible with the
ToS for the Itunes and App store:
http://www.fsf.org/news/blogs/licensing/more-about-the-app-store-gpl-enforce...
To play it safe, the Pd in RjDj only contains the
BSD parts
of Pd, no [expr] etc. Some GPL stuff is included, like the
rj
library, but that's all written by Reality Jockey.
What does authorship have to do with whether the
Appstore ToS conflicts
with the GPL?
The GPL is a license to use copyrighted material that you otherwise would not have any legal right to use.
That's not the greatest definition I've ever heard (think of fair use, for example). But if you're trying to saying the GPL gives users freedoms, where historically licensing agreements were used to *restrict* distribution to a particular publisher, then yes.
If the author of GPL software posts their software to the appstore, it could be read as a implied statement that the author is not going to enforce all aspects of the GPL. An explicit statement to that effect would be better.
I don't know about the legal issues involved in this, but I would think if you're going to use the GPL and *not* enforce it, you'd do better to cover yourself by refraining from saying anything explicitly about what you will or will not enforce.
Morally, I'd be suspicious of using any software that holds this caveat because as far as I can see it diminishes the importance of at least one (if not all) of the four freedoms outlined in the GPL. (Because if *everyone* explicitly stated their intention not to enforce, GPL would carry little weight.)
If you don't want to enforce those four freedoms, use the three-clause BSD license.
If you don't own the copyright, then that is not your decision to make.
That wasn't what my question was about.
My question was if [expr] is left out in order to "play it safe," then why is other GPL software included, and what is the relevance that Reality Jockey is the author of that GPL software? But from Frank's recent post it's obvious he did a lot of thinking about this and planned things carefully with regard to distributing the GPL stuff, so that answered my question.
However, if the GPL stuff is being distributed over the appstore as
well, isn't there still the problem that the user is agreeing both to the
GPL terms AND Apple's ToS (which conflict according to the FSF)?
It's a bit comical in this case, since Apple's "usage rules" are
applying to patches that double as the source code, but maybe there are
other issues at play.
-Jonathan
.hc
Programs should be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute. - from Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs
-
Jonathan Wilkes