Perhaps. I think it has more to do with being on good terms with the US. The rise of Islamic extremists to their current fervour could also have had something to do with the Crusade GWB undertook (and dragged us along with) a few years ago.
If we distanced ourselves from the US, I think that might also help.
That didn't stop GWB. I thought the Bill of Rights was just a series of suggestions when it suited the US, and an unalterable, unwavering set of rules otherwise.
It's not as one sided as some in the US like to make out - we have had periods of mutual benefit. The fact that we have land here for US air force bases, for example. Or the trade of custom reactor designs for our subs in exchange for acoustic silencing tech that the US didn't have.
The UK may be a physically small country, but it holds a disproportionate amount of power in the EU for its population which makes it politically very potent.
Only the properly ignorant think this is about who has the biggest army or other nonsensical bravado.
And yes, during WW2 we were economically crippled and relied on convoys from the US. It may have had something to do with being bombed continually by an enemy force and surrounded by submarines. Prior to WW2, the UK was coming off the back of one of its biggest periods of trade and industry - we were the workshop of the world for a long time, despite our diminutive land area.
Pretty well - our death rate due to firearms (accidental or otherwise) is very low.
So much for "if guns were illegal, only criminals will have guns!"
I like guns as much as the next guy, but our lack of a second amendment equivalent really doesn't put us at as much of a disadvantage as people seem to think.
The Dock connector is the shape it is to enable it to fit on the iPod - other than that, it's standard and has been since it was included.There's nothing secret or encrypted about it. If you want to use it, it's well documented (hardware and software) for your theoretical device to interface with the iPod. No "hand waving" or anything there.
They get a lot of bad press, and people like to sweep some of the good things they are doing under the rug to concentrate on the walled garden and app store, which only pertain to the iOS ecosystem. They are open in their formats - almost all of their data formats are open (.mbox for email, documented xml for iWork etc, open formats for calendar and contacts [and open sourcing their calendar server and contact sync server tools], aac for audio, h.264 for video, LLVM, libdispatch, many other open source projects and formats.)
No, the licence fee must be paid to use the connector - ie, if you make something that physically has the connector present (like a docking station) - if you want to implement the protocol, no one is stopping you - my car's head unit has a standard USB port on the back that controls an iPod via the accessory protocol.
Fees for connectors are not unique to the dock connector - the USB port is similarly covered, as is the firewire port, and many others.
The things that have changed between iPod generations can vary a lot - not just the the license fee. You misunderstand what the fee is and when it is paid - it is when the device is *made*, so attaching a new generation iPod to that stereo and it not working has nothing to do with a fee not being paid. The stereo manufacturer pays when the device is made initially to ship a device with the dock connector on it (although in my experience with most car head units, they don;t actually have a dock connector, so the fee is irrelevant anyway - they just implement the iPod accessory protocol, which rarely changes but has between some iPods. It underwent a change when Apple dropped firewire from the iPod lineup, for example, and had a couple of changes between the 4G and 5G iPod I believe. A software update for the head unit usually fixes this. It has absolutely nothing to do with not paying a fee. The protocol has largely remained unchanged, but some parts of it have been changed or extended as the iPod line has grown. Some Sony head units, for example, can now charge later generation models (5G and up) that they couldn't before, and things like the iPod Touch and iPhone can attempt to negotiate with the device they connect to to determine what version of of the Accessory Protocol they are using and fall back into legacy mode if necessary. My iPhone does this when I connect it to my car's head unit, although sometimes it gets stuck trying to use the newer protocol (since the upgrade to iOS 4) and complains about incompatible head unit, but unplugging and replugging refreshes it and it drops back to the old protocol and works fine. (I am pretty sure this is down to performance issues on iOS 4 on the 3G iPhone, with a reply on the bus timing out when the phone is connected "cold" to the car. Unplugging and immediately replugging instantly fixes it).
Do you realise why Amazon was able to sell DRM free music in the first place? The iTunes store. There is *no way* the Amazon mp3 store would have happened without the iTunes store. It was a response to the music industry realising it had all its eggs in one basket (the iTunes store) and thus was limited in its negotiating power for price controls (they wanted variable pricing from the start). The mp3 model from Amazon would never have been on the table at all were it not for the iTunes store - which was also trying to renegotiate for DRM free (in exchange for variable pricing).
When the industry realised that online music sales actually did work as a business model, and that if they weren't careful the entire market would belong to the iTMS, they started distributing via other channels - Amazon was one of these.
Had the iTunes music store never existed, and the industry content to stay they way it had always been, there would never have been an Amazon mp3 store.
The result of all this is that there is now consumer choice in the online download market for music - DRM-free aac files from iTunes, playable on any device that supports aac, or mp3 files from Amazon, playable on any device that supports mp3. Both are patented formats, but both are open standards.
The iPod connector is not anything to do with DRM. It's a hardware connector - a documented hardware connector that is standard across all iPods (since it was introduced - obviously the original iPod has a 6 pin FW connector). There's no DRM involved - the signals across it are not encrypted in any way, there are no keys to control it, it is not obfuscated at all, as all the pins are documented and explained in Apple's literature for anyone making a device that interfaces with the iPod. The software that goes with that (inside the iPod) is also documented.
You are mistaking what DRM actually is, which seems to be common in many of these discussions. The 30 pin dock connector may be proprietary (ie, you need a licence fee to use it), but this is no different to many other hardware connectors - the USB one, for example (which is on the other end of the 30 pin cable, funnily enough). Just because it is a proprietary connector does not mean it has anything to do with DRM.
The apps are not DRM'ed either - they are simple zip files with an application bundle inside them, much like an actual OS X app (except those are not compressed) containing the assets and the binary and any other files needed.
Movies are still DRM encumbered because without it, there would be no content - the movie and TV studios will not provide the content without DRM on it. It's much like the situation with music a few years ago. No DRM, no content.
Can you guess where this is going with books?
For things entirely in Apple's control, DRM is conspicuously absent - the OS X install disc has no encryption on it, nor does it even need a serial number or any sort of activation. It just installs. The only barrier to installing it on a non-Mac is a plain text file that says "please don;t steal OS X" that you can remove and then reburn the image (it's not a special "non standard" DVD that can't be easily copied in a home DVD burner) so you can install it on any machine.
It also doesn't care how many times you install it on Macs in your home (although technically you are supposed to buy 1 licence for each machine, there is no actual enforcement).
The original iMac (the coloured one) ran on the commercial "Rip, Mix, Burn" which is as strong a promotion of Fair Use in a commercial that I have ever seen - the thrust of the commercial was to rip all your CDs into iTunes, arrange them into playlists of your choice, and then make CDs of them to listen to wherever you wanted (disclaimer for slashdot: Apple didn't invent this, but they made it super easy to do in iTunes for the common man). No DRM in sight.Just strong encouragement to do what you want with your music.
OF COURSE Apple's plan is to make money - and they have been one of the few to realise that the best way to do that is to *give customers what they want* - they wanted DRM-free music, and they knew this, but were unable to deliver and had to compromise (since they do not control the music itself, and had to convince the music industry that DRM-free was a viable business model). So, they put in the weakest DRM they could get away with, and provided a way in iTunes to strip it off by burning to Audio CD, which they strongly encouraged you to do every time you downloaded songs. It wasn't ideal (since you'd have to re-encode and thus lose a little quality, but the Audio CD itself was indistinguishable from the downloaded tracks).
I don't think any piece of Apple-provided evidence is going to convince you, but the history is right there.
So you're saying Apple should never have approved the VLC app?
They slightly changed the wording of the the TOS so that the store became compatible with GPL v2, which VLC is under. It's actually fine (although Apple may decide to take it down anyway, to avoid any hassle), but the VLC dev in question still fancied a ideological rant that the FSF was quick to champion.
Apple was not explaining itself after being caught beating its wife again, it's being chastised for approving apps with licences that actually are compatible with the store. If the app was under GPL v3 then it would be different - and the argument that Apple should change its policies to be compatible with v3 is just a non starter.
UK cops really don't care about personal use of weed. They'll take it off you if they find it on you during the course of a search for another offence (a weapons check, for example), but they aren't going to specifically go after you for it. Just not worth the time.
Weed really isn't a huge deal in the UK, where this story is from. If a cop catches you with some, they will "arrest and then de-arrest" you at the side of the road/in the pub/wherever you are and give you a street caution for it, then just confiscate the stuff. If you clearly have enough to be a dealer, they will arrest you properly. Having enough for personal use on you is just not all that serious at all - the cops just don't have the time to be dealing with that petty crap.
But in an entirely disingenuous fashion - VLC is GPL v2, which is compatible with the App Store (the terms and conditions were clarified after the GNU Go thing), so the VLC dev can complain all he wants that it's not compatible - it just ain't so.
If they want to shoot themselves in the foot, they can go right ahead. It's a shame since I had a lot of admiration for VLC. I'm sure it's not all of the devs involved in the project (I have seen at least one post on here with a dissenting dev's opinion), but this sort of thing only hurts the cause. You can't fight a battle on dishonesty.
The decision hasn't even been made yet - the article is merely speculating on the decision Apple will take, and then criticising them for it, even though they haven't actually decided anything yet.
I just used a custom firmware that has had the counter set to infinite. You can change it as many times as you need to. Saves having an extra drive just for my Region 1 discs.
It is exactly for the reason I stated in my post - tools like VLC and other such players attempt to read the disk as a DVD-ROM and bypass the region lock. This works for some drives and not others, as I stated.
One of my machines can do this (a Powerbook), the other one cannot do this (an iMac), and required a firmware upgrade. The only difference is the drive manufacturer.
I live in the UK, and I am aware of this. It's shaky ground as far as the licensing goes - they are technically in breach and could be challenged.
Now, the argument against the lock is free trade, and could explain why no one has gone after this infringement yet. The other reason could be simple economics - DVDs in the UK are just as cheap as in the US now, meaning the incentive to import cheaper discs from other markets is much lower now than it used to be (remember when DVDs were well over £20 each, and the equivalent disc was $15 - I used to order them from the states for this reason, and my trusty chipped Pioneer DV-515 is still going strong to this day).
All computer DVD drives are shipped as RPC-2 (firmware locked) as far as I know since they are manufactured for the global market, unlike some standalone players that can be unlocked with a code punched into the remote, or are just region free out of the box which are made specifically for regional markets.
They never wanted DRM to start with, but were forced to use it if they wanted content. The plan was always to remove it as soon as they could (by changing the deal with the content providers).
The App Store is actually compatible with the GPL v2. This was changed after the whole issue with GNU Go.
Not to mention that "Apple" covers a lot of ground - OS X itself is highly compatible with OSS software. Apple even runs their own large OSS projects, and contributes to many others, GPL and otherwise.
VLC. Their stuff. Their rules. They don't like apple taking their stuff without following their rules. Stop that.
Yes, which is exactly what they did last time when they complied with a request to remove GNU Go.
FSF: "Hey, stop distributing GNU Go!" Apple: "Ok, we have taking it down. It's no longer on the store." FSF: "Wait, we didn't mean that! We meant for you to change your policies to make the store GPL compatible!" Apple: "I see. Good luck with that. We exercise our freedom to choose our own terms and conditions on our store."
"Apple" doesn't offer you a limited number of region changes, that is part of the firmware of the DVD drive, and is common to *all* DVD drives to be in compliance with the specification. It's a brainless part of the spec, but it is in there at the behest of the movie industry. All of Apple's drives are standard off-the-shelf drives from a number of manufacturers - off the top of my head, they use Sony, Matashita (panasonic), NEC and Pioneer drives, among others.
VLC can attempt to ignore the region code, but it only works on some drives. Certain ones (usually the more modern Panasonic ones) are crippled further, preventing bypass of the region lock this way. My older Powerbook's drive can be bypassed with VLC, but my newer iMac's drive doesn't work like that and required that I patch it with an RPC-1 firmware.
In order to actually sell a DVD drive, it has to have this brainless region coding - the manufacturers who make them would face licensing consequences if they shipped region free drives. Apple itself does not make DVD drives, but they are affected by this downstream - they can't install custom firmwares that remove the restriction.
It's also a handy platform to take another shot at the upcoming App Store in 10.7, which has nothing to do with this issue, but nevertheless the last paragraph is there for some baseless speculation.
This whole issue just smacks of "rar rah! your licence isn;t compatible with ours! rah!" and Apple saying "ok, we'll just stop distributing your app". "But wait! That's not the outcome we were looking for!"
So, the non-article pretty much says "we complained about another GPL app in the store and rather than Apple change its entire licensing structure, it chose to remove the app in question and stop distributing it" - which is *exactly what the FSF were complaining about*.
* App is distributed on app store * FSF sees it is GPL * complains to Apple that it is not compatible with their licenses * Apple takes it down (or it is suggested that Apple will go this route - there hasn't been a decision on VLC yet, this article is just speculating on what Apple will do and condemning them for a decision they have not yet made)
Really, what is the argument here? There is no justification for righteous indignation when Apple does exactly what it is asked to do. You seriously expect them to change their licensing to be compatible with GPL software? What world are they living in? The App Store is a well known closed ecosystem. This article is nothing but a petulant rant that attempts to apportion blame about "denying great software" to people on iOS devices because of "Apple's restrictions" - when it is just as clear that the restrictions go both ways. The FSF likes to point out that the GPL is incompatible with the App Store (and there's a nice little non-sequitur paragraph at the end with wild speculation that the new app store in 10.7 will be enormously locked down).
This cuts both ways.
The GPL is a marvellous thing, but there are some places it just cannot go, by nature of its restrictions; restrictions put in place to provide more freedom, ironically. This article is nothing more than an attempt to force Apple to deny its own freedom to choose what licenses to use for the App Store - if they happen to be incompatible with the GPL, then tough beans. They have as much right to choose as anyone using the GPL does.
If the lack of wholly GPL software on iOS bothers enough customers, there are other smartphone platforms that are known for not having such a tightly controlled app ecosystem.
Apple was a supporter of DRM-free music and music sharing/fair use long before the iTunes store or iPod revolution - remember "Rip, Mix, Burn"? From the very start they never wanted DRM, but if they wanted content to sell, they had to include it.
So, they made it as weak as possible - they included the ability *in iTunes itself* to strip off the DRM from your tracks, and encouraged you to do so every time you downloaded music. It wasn't ideal (since it required making an Audio CD, so had a transcoding loss if you reripped back to a DRM-free format, but it was a standard audio CD, unencumbered by DRM that you burned from your DRM-covered tracks.
And they also make no secret that the iTunes Store is a vehicle to drive iPod/iPhone sales - it is hardly a huge profit turner for them. The real money is in the hardware, as they have said before on numerous occasions.
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Perhaps. I think it has more to do with being on good terms with the US. The rise of Islamic extremists to their current fervour could also have had something to do with the Crusade GWB undertook (and dragged us along with) a few years ago.
If we distanced ourselves from the US, I think that might also help.
That didn't stop GWB. I thought the Bill of Rights was just a series of suggestions when it suited the US, and an unalterable, unwavering set of rules otherwise.
It's not as one sided as some in the US like to make out - we have had periods of mutual benefit. The fact that we have land here for US air force bases, for example. Or the trade of custom reactor designs for our subs in exchange for acoustic silencing tech that the US didn't have.
The UK may be a physically small country, but it holds a disproportionate amount of power in the EU for its population which makes it politically very potent.
Only the properly ignorant think this is about who has the biggest army or other nonsensical bravado.
And yes, during WW2 we were economically crippled and relied on convoys from the US. It may have had something to do with being bombed continually by an enemy force and surrounded by submarines. Prior to WW2, the UK was coming off the back of one of its biggest periods of trade and industry - we were the workshop of the world for a long time, despite our diminutive land area.
Pretty well - our death rate due to firearms (accidental or otherwise) is very low.
So much for "if guns were illegal, only criminals will have guns!"
I like guns as much as the next guy, but our lack of a second amendment equivalent really doesn't put us at as much of a disadvantage as people seem to think.
The Dock connector is the shape it is to enable it to fit on the iPod - other than that, it's standard and has been since it was included.There's nothing secret or encrypted about it. If you want to use it, it's well documented (hardware and software) for your theoretical device to interface with the iPod. No "hand waving" or anything there.
They get a lot of bad press, and people like to sweep some of the good things they are doing under the rug to concentrate on the walled garden and app store, which only pertain to the iOS ecosystem. They are open in their formats - almost all of their data formats are open (.mbox for email, documented xml for iWork etc, open formats for calendar and contacts [and open sourcing their calendar server and contact sync server tools], aac for audio, h.264 for video, LLVM, libdispatch, many other open source projects and formats.)
They're no saints, but no one is.
No, the licence fee must be paid to use the connector - ie, if you make something that physically has the connector present (like a docking station) - if you want to implement the protocol, no one is stopping you - my car's head unit has a standard USB port on the back that controls an iPod via the accessory protocol.
Fees for connectors are not unique to the dock connector - the USB port is similarly covered, as is the firewire port, and many others.
The things that have changed between iPod generations can vary a lot - not just the the license fee. You misunderstand what the fee is and when it is paid - it is when the device is *made*, so attaching a new generation iPod to that stereo and it not working has nothing to do with a fee not being paid. The stereo manufacturer pays when the device is made initially to ship a device with the dock connector on it (although in my experience with most car head units, they don;t actually have a dock connector, so the fee is irrelevant anyway - they just implement the iPod accessory protocol, which rarely changes but has between some iPods. It underwent a change when Apple dropped firewire from the iPod lineup, for example, and had a couple of changes between the 4G and 5G iPod I believe. A software update for the head unit usually fixes this. It has absolutely nothing to do with not paying a fee. The protocol has largely remained unchanged, but some parts of it have been changed or extended as the iPod line has grown. Some Sony head units, for example, can now charge later generation models (5G and up) that they couldn't before, and things like the iPod Touch and iPhone can attempt to negotiate with the device they connect to to determine what version of of the Accessory Protocol they are using and fall back into legacy mode if necessary. My iPhone does this when I connect it to my car's head unit, although sometimes it gets stuck trying to use the newer protocol (since the upgrade to iOS 4) and complains about incompatible head unit, but unplugging and replugging refreshes it and it drops back to the old protocol and works fine. (I am pretty sure this is down to performance issues on iOS 4 on the 3G iPhone, with a reply on the bus timing out when the phone is connected "cold" to the car. Unplugging and immediately replugging instantly fixes it).
Do you realise why Amazon was able to sell DRM free music in the first place? The iTunes store. There is *no way* the Amazon mp3 store would have happened without the iTunes store. It was a response to the music industry realising it had all its eggs in one basket (the iTunes store) and thus was limited in its negotiating power for price controls (they wanted variable pricing from the start). The mp3 model from Amazon would never have been on the table at all were it not for the iTunes store - which was also trying to renegotiate for DRM free (in exchange for variable pricing).
When the industry realised that online music sales actually did work as a business model, and that if they weren't careful the entire market would belong to the iTMS, they started distributing via other channels - Amazon was one of these.
Had the iTunes music store never existed, and the industry content to stay they way it had always been, there would never have been an Amazon mp3 store.
The result of all this is that there is now consumer choice in the online download market for music - DRM-free aac files from iTunes, playable on any device that supports aac, or mp3 files from Amazon, playable on any device that supports mp3. Both are patented formats, but both are open standards.
Why did you both set an alarm for the same time?
The iPod connector is not anything to do with DRM. It's a hardware connector - a documented hardware connector that is standard across all iPods (since it was introduced - obviously the original iPod has a 6 pin FW connector). There's no DRM involved - the signals across it are not encrypted in any way, there are no keys to control it, it is not obfuscated at all, as all the pins are documented and explained in Apple's literature for anyone making a device that interfaces with the iPod. The software that goes with that (inside the iPod) is also documented.
You are mistaking what DRM actually is, which seems to be common in many of these discussions. The 30 pin dock connector may be proprietary (ie, you need a licence fee to use it), but this is no different to many other hardware connectors - the USB one, for example (which is on the other end of the 30 pin cable, funnily enough). Just because it is a proprietary connector does not mean it has anything to do with DRM.
The apps are not DRM'ed either - they are simple zip files with an application bundle inside them, much like an actual OS X app (except those are not compressed) containing the assets and the binary and any other files needed.
Movies are still DRM encumbered because without it, there would be no content - the movie and TV studios will not provide the content without DRM on it. It's much like the situation with music a few years ago. No DRM, no content.
Can you guess where this is going with books?
For things entirely in Apple's control, DRM is conspicuously absent - the OS X install disc has no encryption on it, nor does it even need a serial number or any sort of activation. It just installs. The only barrier to installing it on a non-Mac is a plain text file that says "please don;t steal OS X" that you can remove and then reburn the image (it's not a special "non standard" DVD that can't be easily copied in a home DVD burner) so you can install it on any machine.
It also doesn't care how many times you install it on Macs in your home (although technically you are supposed to buy 1 licence for each machine, there is no actual enforcement).
The original iMac (the coloured one) ran on the commercial "Rip, Mix, Burn" which is as strong a promotion of Fair Use in a commercial that I have ever seen - the thrust of the commercial was to rip all your CDs into iTunes, arrange them into playlists of your choice, and then make CDs of them to listen to wherever you wanted (disclaimer for slashdot: Apple didn't invent this, but they made it super easy to do in iTunes for the common man). No DRM in sight.Just strong encouragement to do what you want with your music.
OF COURSE Apple's plan is to make money - and they have been one of the few to realise that the best way to do that is to *give customers what they want* - they wanted DRM-free music, and they knew this, but were unable to deliver and had to compromise (since they do not control the music itself, and had to convince the music industry that DRM-free was a viable business model). So, they put in the weakest DRM they could get away with, and provided a way in iTunes to strip it off by burning to Audio CD, which they strongly encouraged you to do every time you downloaded songs. It wasn't ideal (since you'd have to re-encode and thus lose a little quality, but the Audio CD itself was indistinguishable from the downloaded tracks).
I don't think any piece of Apple-provided evidence is going to convince you, but the history is right there.
So you're saying Apple should never have approved the VLC app?
They slightly changed the wording of the the TOS so that the store became compatible with GPL v2, which VLC is under. It's actually fine (although Apple may decide to take it down anyway, to avoid any hassle), but the VLC dev in question still fancied a ideological rant that the FSF was quick to champion.
Apple was not explaining itself after being caught beating its wife again, it's being chastised for approving apps with licences that actually are compatible with the store. If the app was under GPL v3 then it would be different - and the argument that Apple should change its policies to be compatible with v3 is just a non starter.
Yes, I have one on my iMac's drive - very useful.
Was that in the British press?
That well known source of objective coverage of UK events.
It's really not as bad as the Daily Fail and others like to make out.
UK cops really don't care about personal use of weed. They'll take it off you if they find it on you during the course of a search for another offence (a weapons check, for example), but they aren't going to specifically go after you for it. Just not worth the time.
Weed really isn't a huge deal in the UK, where this story is from. If a cop catches you with some, they will "arrest and then de-arrest" you at the side of the road/in the pub/wherever you are and give you a street caution for it, then just confiscate the stuff. If you clearly have enough to be a dealer, they will arrest you properly. Having enough for personal use on you is just not all that serious at all - the cops just don't have the time to be dealing with that petty crap.
But in an entirely disingenuous fashion - VLC is GPL v2, which is compatible with the App Store (the terms and conditions were clarified after the GNU Go thing), so the VLC dev can complain all he wants that it's not compatible - it just ain't so.
If they want to shoot themselves in the foot, they can go right ahead. It's a shame since I had a lot of admiration for VLC. I'm sure it's not all of the devs involved in the project (I have seen at least one post on here with a dissenting dev's opinion), but this sort of thing only hurts the cause. You can't fight a battle on dishonesty.
The decision hasn't even been made yet - the article is merely speculating on the decision Apple will take, and then criticising them for it, even though they haven't actually decided anything yet.
I just used a custom firmware that has had the counter set to infinite. You can change it as many times as you need to. Saves having an extra drive just for my Region 1 discs.
It is exactly for the reason I stated in my post - tools like VLC and other such players attempt to read the disk as a DVD-ROM and bypass the region lock. This works for some drives and not others, as I stated.
One of my machines can do this (a Powerbook), the other one cannot do this (an iMac), and required a firmware upgrade. The only difference is the drive manufacturer.
I live in the UK, and I am aware of this. It's shaky ground as far as the licensing goes - they are technically in breach and could be challenged.
Now, the argument against the lock is free trade, and could explain why no one has gone after this infringement yet. The other reason could be simple economics - DVDs in the UK are just as cheap as in the US now, meaning the incentive to import cheaper discs from other markets is much lower now than it used to be (remember when DVDs were well over £20 each, and the equivalent disc was $15 - I used to order them from the states for this reason, and my trusty chipped Pioneer DV-515 is still going strong to this day).
All computer DVD drives are shipped as RPC-2 (firmware locked) as far as I know since they are manufactured for the global market, unlike some standalone players that can be unlocked with a code punched into the remote, or are just region free out of the box which are made specifically for regional markets.
They never wanted DRM to start with, but were forced to use it if they wanted content. The plan was always to remove it as soon as they could (by changing the deal with the content providers).
The App Store is actually compatible with the GPL v2. This was changed after the whole issue with GNU Go.
Not to mention that "Apple" covers a lot of ground - OS X itself is highly compatible with OSS software. Apple even runs their own large OSS projects, and contributes to many others, GPL and otherwise.
VLC. Their stuff. Their rules. They don't like apple taking their stuff without following their rules. Stop that.
Yes, which is exactly what they did last time when they complied with a request to remove GNU Go.
FSF: "Hey, stop distributing GNU Go!"
Apple: "Ok, we have taking it down. It's no longer on the store."
FSF: "Wait, we didn't mean that! We meant for you to change your policies to make the store GPL compatible!"
Apple: "I see. Good luck with that. We exercise our freedom to choose our own terms and conditions on our store."
"Apple" doesn't offer you a limited number of region changes, that is part of the firmware of the DVD drive, and is common to *all* DVD drives to be in compliance with the specification. It's a brainless part of the spec, but it is in there at the behest of the movie industry. All of Apple's drives are standard off-the-shelf drives from a number of manufacturers - off the top of my head, they use Sony, Matashita (panasonic), NEC and Pioneer drives, among others.
VLC can attempt to ignore the region code, but it only works on some drives. Certain ones (usually the more modern Panasonic ones) are crippled further, preventing bypass of the region lock this way. My older Powerbook's drive can be bypassed with VLC, but my newer iMac's drive doesn't work like that and required that I patch it with an RPC-1 firmware.
In order to actually sell a DVD drive, it has to have this brainless region coding - the manufacturers who make them would face licensing consequences if they shipped region free drives. Apple itself does not make DVD drives, but they are affected by this downstream - they can't install custom firmwares that remove the restriction.
Bingo.
It's also a handy platform to take another shot at the upcoming App Store in 10.7, which has nothing to do with this issue, but nevertheless the last paragraph is there for some baseless speculation.
This whole issue just smacks of "rar rah! your licence isn;t compatible with ours! rah!" and Apple saying "ok, we'll just stop distributing your app". "But wait! That's not the outcome we were looking for!"
So, the non-article pretty much says "we complained about another GPL app in the store and rather than Apple change its entire licensing structure, it chose to remove the app in question and stop distributing it" - which is *exactly what the FSF were complaining about*.
* App is distributed on app store
* FSF sees it is GPL
* complains to Apple that it is not compatible with their licenses
* Apple takes it down (or it is suggested that Apple will go this route - there hasn't been a decision on VLC yet, this article is just speculating on what Apple will do and condemning them for a decision they have not yet made)
Really, what is the argument here? There is no justification for righteous indignation when Apple does exactly what it is asked to do. You seriously expect them to change their licensing to be compatible with GPL software? What world are they living in? The App Store is a well known closed ecosystem. This article is nothing but a petulant rant that attempts to apportion blame about "denying great software" to people on iOS devices because of "Apple's restrictions" - when it is just as clear that the restrictions go both ways. The FSF likes to point out that the GPL is incompatible with the App Store (and there's a nice little non-sequitur paragraph at the end with wild speculation that the new app store in 10.7 will be enormously locked down).
This cuts both ways.
The GPL is a marvellous thing, but there are some places it just cannot go, by nature of its restrictions; restrictions put in place to provide more freedom, ironically. This article is nothing more than an attempt to force Apple to deny its own freedom to choose what licenses to use for the App Store - if they happen to be incompatible with the GPL, then tough beans. They have as much right to choose as anyone using the GPL does.
If the lack of wholly GPL software on iOS bothers enough customers, there are other smartphone platforms that are known for not having such a tightly controlled app ecosystem.
Apple make more than just iPads and iPhones.
The charge was "flash can't be played on Macs".
iPods and iPhones are not Macs. They are made by Apple, but they are not the same.
Apple was a supporter of DRM-free music and music sharing/fair use long before the iTunes store or iPod revolution - remember "Rip, Mix, Burn"? From the very start they never wanted DRM, but if they wanted content to sell, they had to include it.
So, they made it as weak as possible - they included the ability *in iTunes itself* to strip off the DRM from your tracks, and encouraged you to do so every time you downloaded music. It wasn't ideal (since it required making an Audio CD, so had a transcoding loss if you reripped back to a DRM-free format, but it was a standard audio CD, unencumbered by DRM that you burned from your DRM-covered tracks.
And they also make no secret that the iTunes Store is a vehicle to drive iPod/iPhone sales - it is hardly a huge profit turner for them. The real money is in the hardware, as they have said before on numerous occasions.