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VLC Running Kickstarter Campaign To Fund Native Windows 8 App
New submitter aaron44126 writes "Some VLC developers have launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund the development of a native port of VLC as a Windows 8 app. The goal is to create an app with a UI that fits into the rest of the Windows 8 ecosystem that supports the playback of all of the types of files that VLC already supports. Playback of optical media (DVD/VCD/BD) is also on the list. They hope to use as much existing code as possible while doing whatever necessary to get VLC running in the 'Metro' environment and meet Microsoft's requirements for distribution through the Windows Store. Porting to ARM so that it can run on Windows RT devices will happen after the Windows 8 app is complete. The campaign has actually been going on for almost two weeks but they published their first update yesterday, in which they announced their intent to produce a Windows Phone 8 port as well."
Apples DRM restricts a single purchase of an application to 5 devices, so while the source was available, Rémi Denis-Courmont felt that the distribution restrictions were not compatible with GPL, and Apple did not feel like fighting him on it.
I am a little skeptical of the claim since, at it's heart, the GPL is about releasing source back to the community, not about how the final binary is distributed. There was also an argument (not sure if it was in the copyright complaint) that iOS did not allow users to change the version they had installed, so they couldn't grab the source, recompile, and update their version.. but that is an old battle line with GPL and embedded devices.... which is probably beyond the scope of this discussion (and would probably result in a flame war between consumers and developers)