Slashdot Mirror
The Ethics of Selling GPLed Software For the iPhone
SeanCier writes "We're a small (two-person) iPhone app developer whose first game has recently been released in the App store. In the process, we've inadvertently stepped in it, bringing up a question of the GPL and free software ethics that I'm hoping the Slashdot community can help us clear up, one way or the other. XPilot, a unique and groundbreaking UNIX-based game from the early/mid nineties, was a classic in its day, but was forgotten and has been dead for years, both in terms of use and development. My college roommate and I were addicted to it at the time, even running game servers and publishing custom maps. As it's fully open source (GPLv2), and the iPhone has well over twice the graphics power of the SGI workstations we'd used in college, we decided it was a moral imperative to port it to our cellphones. In the process, we hoped, we could breathe life back into this forgotten classic (not to mention turning a years-old joke into reality). We did so, and the result was more playable than we'd hoped, despite the physical limitations of the phone. We priced it at $2.99 on the App store (we don't expect it to become the Next Big Thing, but hoped to recoup our costs — such as server charges and Apple's annual $99 developer fee), released the source on our web page, then enthusiastically tracked down every member of the original community we could find to let them know of the hoped-for renaissance. Which is where things got muddy. After it hit the App store, one of the original developers of XPilot told us he feels adamantly that we're betraying the spirit of the GPL by charging for it."
Read on for the rest of Sean's question.
"That left us in a terrible spot. We'd thought we were contributing to the community and the legacy of this game by reviving it, not stealing from them by charging for it — and we didn't think $2.99 was unreasonable (and, again, the source is available for free from our page). It never occurred to us that one of the original creators would feel that we were betraying their contribution. We've discussed the philosophical fine points of free-as-in-speech vs. free-as-in-beer with him, and have suggested a number of remedies — such as reducing the price (it's now $1.99), profit-sharing with previous contributors, making the game free at some point in the future (once we'd at least recouped our costs), or going 'freemium' (offering a fully-functional free version plus a paid version with enhancements we added ourselves, with both GPLed of course). But in each case, the bottom line is that this developer feels the app should be free-as-in-beer period, and anything less is a sleazy betrayal of anybody that made contributions under that license. Which is a shame, because we deeply respect his work on this game and would love for him to be on board with the port — but at the same time this was months worth of work and we honestly believe we're going about this in a reasonable way.
Obviously, one of us has a non-mainstream understanding of open source ethos, but it's become clear we can't come to a consensus on which of us it is, and whether the 'spirit of the GPL' should allow selling GPLed software (especially when one wasn't the original creator of the software, but a more recent contributor). The only way to determine that, it seems, is to poll the open source community itself.
We're determined to do the right thing by the GPL and the community, and we'd like to hear opinions on this. Remember, we're not talking about whether it's practical to base a business on GPLed software, nor the best business model for doing so, and certainly not whether the source must be distributed for free (obviously it must be), but just whether charging for the binary version of an enhanced/ported version of a GPLed app (while releasing the corresponding source for free) is an ethically defensible thing to do."
Obviously, one of us has a non-mainstream understanding of open source ethos, but it's become clear we can't come to a consensus on which of us it is, and whether the 'spirit of the GPL' should allow selling GPLed software (especially when one wasn't the original creator of the software, but a more recent contributor). The only way to determine that, it seems, is to poll the open source community itself.
We're determined to do the right thing by the GPL and the community, and we'd like to hear opinions on this. Remember, we're not talking about whether it's practical to base a business on GPLed software, nor the best business model for doing so, and certainly not whether the source must be distributed for free (obviously it must be), but just whether charging for the binary version of an enhanced/ported version of a GPLed app (while releasing the corresponding source for free) is an ethically defensible thing to do."
For now, anyway.
Remember when TiVo went by the letter of the GPL (v2) but not the apparent spirit? A new section of GPL v3 was born.
I'm not saying that in the future, a GPLvN -will- exist that includes terms regarding sale of GPL(vN)'ed software - but in the given case, why wouldn't there be.
Sure, the source to this game is available. Hooray for every other iPhone developer. However, if you're not a developer, you can't just install it on your device even if you compile it.
In addition, -if- a developer were to pick up the code and compile it.. they, in turn, can't distribute it outside of the iTunes store. ( I seem to recall Apple being okay with source code distribution when it concerns GPL - but a Google search seems to bring up lots of (old) blog posts about it being prohibited. )
On top of that, there's probably little chance that it would be accepted into the iTunes store, seeing as it's a 1:1 duplicate of an existing app.
If you don't want other people making money from your work, then you shouldn't release anything under the GPL. That's easy...
But is it legal to release any iPhone application under the GPL? Apple puts restrictions on what you can do with the application once you've downloaded it - i.e. you're not allowed to redistribute or modify it. Unless all of the copyright holders of the GPL code give their permission to release it under these more restrictive terms, that be a violation wouldn't it?
Remember when TiVo went by the letter of the GPL (v2) but not the apparent spirit? A new section of GPL v3 was born.
And do you remember the huge, long, debate over whether what Tivo did really *did* violate the "spirit"? I don't think it did, and I think the GPLv3 is an overreaction to a complete non-issue. Even if you do acknowledge there is such a thing as a "spirit" to the contract, you still have to recognize that there are as many different interpretations of that "spirit" as their are users of it.
Comment of the year
Lots of people complain about Redhat charging every day.
As for CentOS, it is probably core to Redhat's business, as no body is going to develop an app on Fedora, and deploy on RHEL as you would have to retest everything, may as well use Ubuntu as RHEL if you are moving off Fedora, Ubuntu might even be easier to move to.
CentOS is what people that think they might have to deploy on RHEL for production use for skunkworks projects.
Work bio at MMWD
I can see where your arguments are coming from and I think your opinion makes sense.
However anyone can download the code from their website and compile it on the iphone simulator (which, together with XCode is a free download from Apple). You could argue that you still need a non-free os to run it which won't make RMS happy, but then again on a PC you more often than not have a non free BIOS that's needed to run the OS. And pretty much any computer has a non-free hardware.
Because of this, and other reasons, in my opinion there's nothing wrong with selling a GPL program on the Itunes store as long as anyone who bought it can get the source code.
IMHO, Ethics isn't the issue here. Someone either misunderstood or doesn't want to accept that GPL'd software can have a price put on it... So long as the source is available for free or less than the cost of the binary (I prefer free of course ^_^).
I checked out the authors site and lo! There was the source code and I even downloaded a copy for good measure.
There really isn't any reason that someone who has put a lot of work and money into building/porting/developing/fixing a GPL application can't charge for the complied binary other than having to listen to those who don't wish to pay and are far too lazy/technically lacking to compile their own from the source.
The only person "in the wrong" here was the one complaining.
I own a copy of XPilot for the iPhone as I couldn't resist the classical goodness. The author put a LOT of work into making it exceptionally polished and playable on a platform that it wasn't intended for. Not to mention (as the author did) the cost of development.
That was $3 gladly spent. As much as I rely on free apps, I don't much mind spending >10 on REALLY good portable device apps and >20 on desktop apps here and there. The thing is, they need to be significantly better than average to be "worth buying" in my mind. This is why I actually donate to authors of apps that are one, two or even three cuts above.
Show them some love people and perhaps fewer developers would charge you for the pleasure of initially using it in the first place!
This signature is lame.
Of course there's a spirit of the licence. You don't think that lawyerspeak is the most important value in life do you? Or that ethics consists of doing the maximum that you can get away with while still squeezing within the letter of the law? In fact, according to its author, the letter of the GPL is less important than its spirit, which is expressed in the preamble:
Now, is this spirit being upheld when you buy the app from the App Store? Do you have freedom to distribute copies of it to other iPhone users? Can you change the software and run your changed version? It's pretty clear that people who buy it from the App Store don't have these freedoms; even if they can get the source code from some web site, that's about as much use to them as the printed copies of source code that used to be supplied with IBM mainframes instead of a real online copy you can rebuild and run. So I think the original author had a point; he and his fellow contributors made the software with the expectation that everyone who gets it can freely share and modify it, but here most users cannot.
On the other hand, there are those who don't think this is what the GPL is about. For example Linus has said it's quite okay to distribute locked-down Linux installations that the user can't modify, despite the language about 'freedom' in the GPLv2 licence. So there is certainly room for interpretation.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
Step 1: Port game
Step 2: General controversy over game
Step 3: Profit!
IMHO this post was scored incorrectly.... this is not just "Funny" but is also just plain smart/insightful. this may have been a clever move, but it was more than that...this was just plain smart. creating controversy (especially among this community) is advertising. i imagine that sales for this game has gone up (and will continue to go up) since this post. i for one will probably pick this game up when i finish this post. like i said, many times controversy => advertisement...and a lot of that advertisement ends up being positive...i mean geeze....look at the tone of this thread... -ryan
Well, I'm that disgruntled original developer, and I'll let other developers chime in if they feel like it, though most of the conversations with Sean and Michael (SM) have been with me. I'm incredibly torn:
On the one hand, SM have put some life back into a project that's dear to my heart, and I'm really thrilled about that. They deserve thanks.
On the other hand, SM are trying to unfairly profit from the man-years of development work that went into XPilot, and that just rubs me (and the other developers that I asked) the wrong way.
Why is XPilot not free? "Covering distribution costs" is a joke. They are negligible ($99 per year amortized across all their projects) and I (and I'm sure tons of other people too) is willing to put the game up for free. This wouldn't be very nice to SM, so I was hoping to avoid that.
I even suggested to SM that they make it free after they recouped their distribution costs (which should be about now considering the PR it's getting), but that made them go ballistic.
Is the source is freely available? Well...
1) They haven't checked in any of their source since June (more than a month), though the latest release is from a few days ago.
2) The availability of the source code isn't clearly (or at all) advertised in the game, and until I complained about it, wasn't even advertised on the app store page.
It's pretty clear to me that they did this port wanting to make money from their development time, which is no different from a commercial venture, but quite different from the expectations of every other contributor of XPilot (and other open source projects). I would even say it's against the spirit of the GPL.
There are a number of other issues with selling open source software:
The only thing that might make sense charging for, as far as I can see, is the running of the servers, as that is a per-user cost someone will have to bear.
(I won't even get into the argument that it's against the GPL to even distribute through the app store, but I'll stay away from that since I think that's sad and better dealt with by lawyers and Apple.)
Even if you do acknowledge there is such a thing as a "spirit" to the contract, you still have to recognize that there are as many different interpretations of that "spirit" as their are users of it.
However, the only valid interpretation of the "spirit" of the GPL is that of the FSF. They wrote it, thus they know what they intended. Any differing interpretations are just misinterpretations - just like this original xpilot author's mistaken belief that GPLv2 means a price of zero.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
I absolutely would. In fact, there are loopholes. Case in point:
A man with a lethal weapon (gun) comes into my house. He threatens to kill me. I kill him first. At trial, I plead self-defense. I killed someone, but I had no problem doing it. I defended my life, the lives of my family, and my property. I don't even think I'd feel bad.