[vlc-devel] Formal complaint - censorship

[Juho Vähä-Herttua]

On 26.10.2010, at 13.10, Romain Goyet wrote:
> - Last, but not least : in the "spirit" of the GPL, I really can't
> see where things don't work. Sources are open, anyone can modify,
> rebuild, and run. For instance, if the app was submitted on a
> "jailbroken appstore" like Cydia, the deal wouldn't be any
> different...

Most people run on a phone that is not jailbroken, in fact in some countries it's not even clear if jailbreaking is legal or not. Those people can get the VLC application from Apple's App Store, and they can get the sources from another place. (which is already a bit gray area, the distributor should provide the sources) However, they have no way to run a modified version on the device they own.

It's clearly against the "spirit" of the GPL. I won't comment on the legal part, since I'm uninterested in reading through and understanding all the related legal text. What FSF seems to have a problem with, is that the App Store ToS adds additional restrictions to usage, whereas GPLv2 explicitly denies additional restrictions. That sounds quite sensible and I'd go with FSF here unless otherwise proven.


Juho

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