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

[Rémi Denis-Courmont]

On Wed, 3 Nov 2010 09:57:48 +0100, Romain Goyet <r.goyet at gmail.com> wrote:
> You're being way too harsh on JB. And, more importantly, I really
> don't get your point.

> Isn't his job to actually promote VLC  ?

His job -if you want to call it that way- is to administer the association.
Promoting VLC is an extra. It is cool and helpful and all. Be it is his
choice, and his responsibility.

> And thing is, VLC on the iOS is _the_ big VLC thing these days.

VP8 was the big thing a few months ago. It was still removed and restored
only after Google fixed its licensing terms. Being a big thing is not an
excuse for infringing the intellectual property of contributors to the VLC
and underlying libraries.

(...)
> Also, VLC on the iOS has been downloaded 2 million times in under a
> week : it's about half as much as all the other platforms, including
> the windows version. There's no way a community manager can ignore
> this and not communicate on the topic !

A community manager does not alienate the most important people in the
community, i.e. the developers. Neither would he promote copyright
infringement.

> To summarize, my point is simple : if JB hadn't been talking about
> this, he simply wouldn't have done his job.

Making mistakes is OK. But one should be fixing them instead of blaming
others and persisting in denial. Unless you are a politician.
So far as I remember, the only people who admitted to doing mistakes in
this discussion were Brett and myself.

> Now I understand you guys raised an issue with the GPLv2. To be really
> honest with you guys, we had absolutely no idea of the possibility of
> a license incompatibility. As far as I'm concerned, I really hate
> legalese. (if it were up to me, I would have put MobileVLC's code
> under BSD or public domain). I genuinely thought that as far as we 1/
> Opened all source code and 2/ Licensed it under GPL as well, we were
> ok. Turns out maybe not.
> So given we thought we were doing things "right", I really don't see
> why there shouldn't have been any communication on the iOS port...

I already stated multiple times that I understood why you developed the
code, and why JB promoted it. But I don't understand why JB persists in
blaming the FSF for all of this mess.

-- 
Rémi Denis-Courmont
http://www.remlab.net
http://fi.linkedin.com/in/remidenis