Apple Pulls VLC Media Player From AppStore

An anonymous reader writes "Apple has removed VLC media player from the App Store, putting an end to the controversy on the license (in)compatibilities. Indeed, the iTunes page for VLC media player stopped working. VLC developer Rémi Denis-Courmont notes that he is 'not going to pity the owners of iDevices, and not even the MobileVLC developers who doubtless wasted a lot of their time. This end should not have come to a surprise to anyone.'"

Comments

heh

[stoolpigeon]

a glimpse of the future - when the only way to get "apps" on any computer have to come from the company store.

Re:heh

[devilspgd]

1984 adapted to the modern era where instead of the gov't being in control, corporations control the gov't and us.

Re:heh

[Runefox]

This is pretty wrong. I know it's pretty trollish, but I feel compelled to respond.

computers that can last longer and be cheaper

Trend is actually to computers that are cheaper and more disposable. Once upon a time more companies were trying to release more reliable machines, but the costs were high - Enter Dell, eMachines, Acer and Gateway (the latter three now one and the same), and their business models of inexpensive PC's that aren't necessarily solid broke the market entirely. Computers are becoming disposable, much in the same way mobile phones are.

Used computer market is now becoming HUGE....because no one can afford to retail prices.

Retail prices on PC's have been plummeting for a long time now, and the used computer market is inflating due to the above point: Computers are becoming disposable, and there are even cases where people will toss a computer because of something like a spyware or virus infection.

iPAD subscriptions have taken a complete nose dive of late as people realize how useless and costly the things are

While I never understood the point behind the iPad, its impact on the market in general is undeniable, with Android tablets mimicking its design appearing left and right. Many emerging and future hybrid designs are coming out as iPad-style tablets proper, with a fully-equipped base station featuring a keyboard, mouse, ethernet/display ports, and so on. I know that our provincial government has become very interested in developments by Toshiba in this regard, and may be procuring them to replace laptops in the future.

I want to address the most glaring part last:

too late once open source is OUT into peoples hands its too late.
YOU can't then take it away.

Yeah you can. If, say, Apple decided they wanted to lock down their devices, they could first-off modify their EFI implementation to disable the loading of unsigned (by Apple) software as an operating system. That in itself would disable flavours of Linux from loading, and they could go further still by modifying their operating system to support installation of applications only via their App Store. The beautiful thing is that newer Apple products, both hardware and software, can use a different encryption key for their EFI-OS lockout. Or, they could utilize technology like this:

There exists a real-world potential for such a thing to exist - Microsoft has for a long time been on-again off-again working on something formerly called Palladium, now called Next-Generation Secure Computing Base, which is an implementation of the concept of trusted computing. At the time when this was announced, many thought of this as perhaps being the death of Linux - One major use for this kind of technology is for DRM purposes, wherein only an approved application can access certain data, which could feasibly include the entire system. The hardware required for this kind of thing has been around for a while, and many machines since the AM2/LGA-775 sockets have Trusted Platform Module chips included. One of the more famous applications for this is with Bitlocker.

Re:This is why I refuse to buy apple products.

[MoonBuggy]

The shame is that the companies seem to feel that it's an all or nothing choice. Flash up a big red warning that states "Unsupported software" if you must, but give me the option to use the hardware freely.

Re:This is why I refuse to buy apple products.

[Goaway]

You know the creators of VLC were calling for it to be removed, yes?

Re:This is why I refuse to buy apple products.

[SpacePunk]

You talk as if you own the hardware or something.

Re:This is why I refuse to buy apple products.

[Anonymous Freak]

Not "the creators", but rather "one of the creators" (or possibly "some of".)

The organization VideoLAN officially promoted its use and listing, in spite of one vocal member's protests.

Re:To hell with Apple!

[Goaway]

What the hell do Apple think they are anyway?

People who respect software licenses when the license holders request software be removed from their store?

Re:This is why I refuse to buy apple products.

[Graff]

I was a Mac user until recently, and an Apple II user before I started with Macs. But lately, I just absolutely refuse to use anything with their brand on it because of this precise behavior.

What behavior? Apple clearly stated their terms for the use of the service. The VLC media player developers use a license which is not compatible with those terms. In fact, it was those developers who took the first action:

Today, a formal notification of copyright infringement was sent to Apple Inc. regarding distribution of the VLC media player for iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch.

Apple simply complied with the notification and took down the app in question. If the developers want their software in Apple's App Store then they should release it under a compatible license. I'm sure they can (and perhaps they have) also try to convince Apple to change the terms of the app store.

Every store has to have rules or it'd be complete anarchy. Sometimes these rules are going to get in the way of someone's idea of how it should all work. This is one of those times. Obviously Apple's rules work for a lot of cases since there are tons of apps, both good and bad, in the app store. There's nothing evil going on here, it's just two entities enforcing the terms of use for their properties.

Re:iTunes policy won't work on the desktop

[halowolf]

You mean a group of handset manufacturers outsold a single manufacturer of handsets.

Re:iTunes policy won't work on the desktop

[dave562]

He means that given the choice, the market decided that they preferred something other than Apple more than they preferred Apple.