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iPhone App In App Store Limbo Open Sourced
recoiledsnake writes "The author of iPhone prototyping tool Briefs has decided to open source it after the App store submission has been in limbo for over three months. The app had got into trouble for what Apple believes is being able to run interpreted code, though the author denies it, saying all the compiling happens on the Mac. While Rob stays civil, his co-worker blasts Apple for not even rejecting the app. Three months is nothing compared to Google Voice for the iPhone though, which is still being studied further by Apple after more than a year."
The Briefs code is now up on GitHub, and yes, you can go look at it, however it's not "Open Source" (per OSI), it's not "Free Software" (per the FSF), and it's not "DFSG-free" (per Debian).
If you look at the commit history for the license, he even explicitly changed the license two days ago to make it less free:
2010-08-28
Modified license terms to disallow someone from reselling Briefs without making major modifications. Also protect the Briefs trademark. Still, free source code, huh? Not too shabby.
Prior to two days ago, the code was under the... well, I'm not exactly sure what license!
Here's the license (the first paragraph is a dead ringer for the opening of the MIT License):
Copyright (c) 2009-2010, Rob Rhyne
Briefs is a trademark of Digital Arch Design Corp.
http://robrhyne.com/
http://digitalarch.net/
All rights reserved.
Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person
obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation
files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without
restriction except as noted below, including without limitation
the rights to use,copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute,
and/or sublicense, and to permit persons to whom the Software is
furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:
Here's the non-FOSS part:
The Software and/or source code cannot be copied in whole and
sold without meaningful modification for a profit.
This is more of the MIT license:
The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be
included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
This middle part looks like the BSD license:
Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright
notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.
Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright
notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in
the documentation and/or other materials provided with
the distribution.
Actually, there are only two clauses there, so that's essentially the 2-clause BSD, not the 3-clause one (just a minor point, really).
Then we get the YELLING-AT-YOU indemnification clause. Lawyers seem to love these things, but they seem so uncouth to me. Anyhow, for 5 points, from which license was this paragraph chosen?
THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND,
EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES
OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND
NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT
HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY,
WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING
FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR
OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.
That's right! It's the indemnification clause from the MIT license.
I googled around trying to figure out if other people used this same license, but the best I came up with was the NCSA license. It's unlikely that this license is based off that one, as the phrase to deal in the Software (MIT) is used in this new license instead of to deal with the Software (NCSA).
One more thing: let's point out exactly why the license doesn't pass any of the most popular FOSS metrics:
1) "Open Source" (per OSI)
Per
coding is life
You're joking.
USB was introduced in 1995. It was present - STANDARD - on every machine and motherboard a year later when I was comparing prices. The iMac G3 wasn't released until 1998.
Yes, there were other ports on those machines. There were other ports on the iMac G3 as well, a pair of firewire ports that went to... uhm... a few crappy, barely-even-apple-compatible cameras, and maybe a few specially designed keyboards that worked better with a standard MIDI interface anyways.
To claim that a shitty little closed-box unit with a hockey-puck mouse, crappy OS (System 8... gah that makes me want to puke just thinking about it) and that barely could hold 1% of the computer market somehow "created the market for USB peripherals" is just fucking stupid.