iPhone SDK and Free Software Don't Match

kookjr writes "Are you planning to develop software for the iPhone? If you want to develop Free Software, Linux.com (Shares corp overlord w/ Slashdot) has a good review of the conflicts between Apple's Registered iPhone Developer Agreement and licenses like the GPL. This is important for people who may not read all the agreements they click Agree to."

Comments

Re:Why should *everything* be GPL compatible?

[jrumney]

when at the same time the GPL itself doesn't strive for great compatibility with others.

A great amount of effort went into writing GPLv3 in such a way that it would be compatible with Apache License v2.0 and other Free licenses.

GPLv2 MAY BE incompatible...

[nweaver]

Actually, GPLv2 MAY BE incompatible, if the answer is "code which uses the iPhone APIs contains confidential information". In that case, you could only distribute the code to other registered developers, not everyone, which means Berkeley liscence is fine but GPL is not.

Also, apple's method of distribution MAY BE GPLv2 incompatible, because Apple might not want to also be responsible for distributing the source code and some GPLv2 authors may not like derivitive works where a different party distributes the source code compared to the binary (because the developer could always host the code if its not confidential), and the GPLv2 as written says it is the binary distributer's responsibility to distribute the source code.

We don't know yet, but if the distribution is not GPLv2 friendly:
If you ask the Free Software Foundation, that would be a feature.
If you ask Apple, that would be a feature.

Re:GPLv2 MAY BE incompatible...

[kithrup]

The normal ADC NDA says the same thing, and that has never prevented anyone from distributing application source code. (One can argue that the third-party books which describe the API cover this -- but books always lag behind, and I've never seen anyone worried that they'll be sued by Apple for distributing their application source code before any third-party books describing the APIs they're using are out.)

Of course, I'm neither a lawyer nor Apple (and certainly not an Apple lawyer), so I can't speak definitively... but common sense seems to say this is a red herring.

Re:Then no cell phone is compatible.

[Dionysus]

As someone who has written cell phone software before, I can tell you that Symbian and Windows Mobile also require application signing before allowing your programs to run on their platforms

Oh, please. You hear this excuse from Apple apologists every time this issue comes up. Of all the programs on my Nokia N70, only the stuff from Nokia, Opera and Adobe is signed. Gmail app is not signed. None of the games are signed. They all installed and run fine.