[vlc-devel] FSF position on GPLv2 & current App Store terms

[Brett Smith]

Jean-Baptiste,

Thanks for your feedback; I appreciate it.  I wanted to take this
opportunity to address one issue with the analysis specifically that you
brought up.

On Tue, 2010-11-02 at 15:21 +0100, Jean-Baptiste Kempf wrote:
> * About the dishonesty of your analysis. In your blog post, you refer to
> the Gnu GO case (that was refered to in the first analysis of Rémi,
> that originated the complaint, but that is irrelevant here), which is
> totally irrelevant on the case here, since Apple changed its license.
> http://www.fsf.org/news/2010-05-app-store-compliance
> You in fact acknowledge this, since your analysis has shifted from
> distribution to usage, which is a different topic§.

As I mentioned in my previous post, I checked this before I made the
blog post, and I confirmed that the fundamental analysis was not
affected by Apple's changes.  And that's still true.  My analysis of the
current terms talks about how the Usage Rules restrict distribution,
just like the previous version relating to GNU Go.

The reason I talked about use in addition to distribution in the more
recent analysis is because there were so many questions about how the
sentence about the scope of GPLv2 in section 0 interacted with the
condition in section 6.  Since those questions focused on restricting
use, I thought it would be valuable to discuss issues about use in the
analysis, to help clarify that such restrictions are not permitted under
section 6 either.  People weren't asking about section 0 when we
enforced in the GNU Go case, so it just didn't occur to me to address it
back then.

Best regards,

-- 
Brett Smith
License Compliance Engineer, Free Software Foundation

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