No, he's not trying to impose additional conditions. The GPL doesn't allow distribution under terms that are more restrictive than the GPL is. The app store terms of use are more restrictive, so apps affected by the GPL can not be distributed through it.
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-2.0.html See section 6. The GPL applies to the developer, not any distributor. The store selling a CD with GPL'ed programs is not bound by any more than the end user. It is not an EULA. Remi is trying to impose additional restrictions upon VLC which are not present in GPLV2. His actions are preventing end users from accessing the program. The developers who wrote the port are in no way violating the GPLV2 as long as they provide a written offer for the source code to any interested third party. Stop trying to read in languages which does not exist in V2 of the license.
We should note that his employer is Nokia which is a direct competitor to Apple in the mobile space and that Nokia has an app store as well called OVI. I would consider that a conflict of interest for Remi. Perhaps he should leave the project to avoid a conflict of interest.
If the VLC codebase is licensed under the GPLV2, could his demands, which are contrary to the wishes of the other contributors be a violation of the GPLV2 conditions? Isn't he trying to impose additional conditions not present in the GPLV2 language? INAL but this is an interesting question. Will the rest of the team have to do a fork that removes/rewrites any of his contributions to the codebase to restore GPLV2 compliance?
Sorry, but I don't follow. Rémi Denis-Courmont, an employee of Nokia, demanded the take down. He sited incompatibility with the GPL but VLC is currently licensed under GPLV2 which is compatible with the Appstore. There are serveral GPLV2 apps available on the app store with the only stipulation that it be "free". The developer is still under the obligation to distribute the source code if requested by any interested third party. The app in question was "Free" on the appstore.
Given these facts, I don't see your reasoning and I have to conclude that your post is a thinly veiled troll.
I personally don't care if you use macs or not but please stop spreading FUD.
Rémi Denis-Courmont is a Nokia employee and it is possible that someone and Nokia put him up to this. If this is the case then there could be a violation of EU competition law.
And I remember a time when OSS developers weren't shooting themselves in the foot, yelling at Apple to pull their own app because it violated the GPL to distribute it on the store, and Apple complied with that request by pulling it, and how somehow that makes them the bad guy.
For the record, the App Store is compatible with GPLv2, as long as the app is free as in beer.
So, VLC devs submit VLC to store. Apple approves app. One VLC dev disagrees and demands Apple remove the app due to licence violation. Apple removes app from app store. VLC dev cries and froths that it's "their loss" and "won't cry for users of iOS devices".
What am I missing?
Nothing other than the dev filing the complaint works for Nokia. This is anticompetitive behaviour. I would not be surprised if his boss at Nokia bribed him to do it.
Way to go Rémi Denis-Courmont. You have successfully alienated a bunch of people for your own selfish reasons. Your ego will be your own undoing. As I understanding it, VLC depends upon not just the good will of people contributing their time to code, fix bugs and/or QA for bugs but also donations from individuals.
I thought that open source was supposed to be about collaboration and sharing. These kinds of personal pissing contests do nothing to promote good will.
You could have had the opportunity to get VLC into the hands of more people which I thought was the whole point of software development regardless of your philosophy. Software without users is a waste of time and just a bunch of irrelevant mental masturbation.
Instead of choosing to be to be the bigger man and work with other people, you decided to be a prick.
I predict that the VLC project will die on the vine.
How is this flamebait? How are current Intel Macs any different from other PCs? And OS X is based on BSD.
They have a proprietary power management system which allows you to schedule power on and off, audio out ports which support both analog and digital optical do not turn on the optical output unless if you plug something into the port. Macs use EFI for everything. There are also some performance tweaks on the motherboard and that is one of the reasons why macs were a bit faster running windows than an equivalent spec PC. The other reason for the speed increase was that the video bios is emulated by the bios compatibility model so any code that access the video bios will be faster accessing the in memory bios rather than bios on the gfx card.
Finally, OS X is not based on BSD alone. It has a XNU kernel which is a hybrid of Mach microkernel code and some BSD kernel code. It also has some BSD userland, GNU userland, System V Unix and proprietary stuff written in house.
Apple has open sourced the core OS including some stuff developed in house.
The.pkg format installer packages used by OS X originated on NeXTStep. It has been used in disk images for ages. The.app application package directory format originated on NeXTStep as well. These formats predate Java as.jar files are loosely based on the structure of.app directory packages.
You'd be amazed how many people are oblivious to design.
But in this case, I think AC is not really talking about design, but a mental cantrip where you use the far better modelling system of your brain rather than a wall covered in sticky notes that some people prefer, in order to some up with a truly holistic design.
I do the same, and find it baffling when other cannot do it.
Sticky notes on a wall? Really? I've seen people use sticky notes for planning an iteration/release with feature requests but I have not seen anyone use them for implementation design.
Outselling iOS on phones? Not in the most recent quarters and if you compare OS to OS. Not by a long shot. When you combine iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad sales against Android there is no comparison.
This is already been discussed at length on androidcentral. The consensus is that this stupid rumor is false. It makes absolutely no sense to require any particular number of cores to run Android.
Who is writing this stuff and what is their motive???
You do realize that androidcentral is not an official google site but rather one run by android fanboys right? I would not consider consensus at a fanboy site to be worth much.
Given the anecdotal evidence of the poor performance of the UI in current android version from the Dalvik VM when garbage collection occurs, I am not surprised by this rumour at all.
Google needs to work on providing a HAL for graphics acceleration and fix the GC strategy of Dalvik or create a "universal binary" standard for C based development on android if it wants to compete against Windows Phone 7 let alone iOS.
So I could with an old Toshiba E800 PocketPC 7 years ago (Windows Mobile 2003 SE by the way). It was not a PC then, it is not now.
You cannot be serious? It had that form factor of what many phones have. I could do all of those things with an iPhone too but it is the wrong form factor and screen aspect ratio.
The iPad has a resolution of 1024x768 which is the same resolution and some netbooks.
In the corporate world, it can be considered a PC, especially for executives.
With an iPad, you can give a presentation connected to a projector.
With an iPad, you can take notes in a meeting.
With an iPad, you can access a citrix farm to run windows applications.
With an iPad, you can check your calendar, make new appointments.
WIth an iPad, you can check your corporate exchange email and that same account can be used to wipe the device remotely if it is lost or stolen.
If you really prefer a physical keyboard, you can use a Bluetooth keyboard with it and it a pinch, you can use a USB keyboard with the camera adaptor kit if you don't have a bluetooth keyboard handy.
If MSFT is a "perfect example" of a company with "stagnant or declining revenues, stagnant or declining stock prices or both" when in fact its revenue growth has been at 11% throughout the last decade? For someone called aristotle-dude, you seem to be far too easily swayed by hype.
Dude, take a look at their stock price. It has been either stagnant or declining. A few cents every quarter does not make up for several dollars in decline of share price over a year.
I would say that buying Microsoft stock is an investment that you expect to make some return on in the form of dividends. Whether that's a sound investment is another thing entirely. It's not an absolute gamble as investing in Apple or Dell would be.
You cannot be serious. If you had invested in MSFT a year ago, you would have earned approximately 55 cents per share in dividends but you would have lost about 2.98 dollars per share in stock price.
Now if you had bought shares in AAPL a year ago, you would have made profit of 115.57 dollars per share if you had sold them today.
If you had bought DELL stock a year ago, you would lose 0.85 cents per share if you had sold it today.
Metrics and growth? Sure. Enough to account for it's current valuation? A P/E of over 20 on an established company, and no dividends? No, I don't think so. It's pure hype. Which doesn't mean there isn't room to make more money there still, but that doesn't mean it's actually worth what it's going for.
You do realize that Apple does not get any additional money from you when you buy AAPL stock from someone else on the stock market right? Now given that fact, what makes you think that you have a "right" to dividends? Did you invest in AAPL during their IP? Did you lend them money? If not, they why should some arbitrary stock speculator get money when all it does is erode the value of the company and reduce its liquidity?
Dividends are paid out by companies that are no longer on a growth cycle. They are companies that were once dominant and are now on a downward trend.
Dividends? Dividends erode the value of the company and are paid out by companies which have stagnant or declining revenues, stagnant or declining stock prices or both. MSFT is a perfect example of this. They pay dividends in an attempt to get suckers like you to buy into their stock when they fully know that the stock has nowhere do go but down.
Companies that don't pay dividends are companies that are still on the rise.
I have to respectfully disagree with you on this one. A text based UI is a terrible idea. For one, it creates a huge for internationalization if you want to maintain any sort of continuity/consistency across cultures. Then consider the whole "hub" idea. Does it even make sense to other cultures? Right now, Windows Phone 7 is limited to "english" markets and will be limited to them for some time to come because of the design decisions they made.
The iOS UI, on the other hand, is designed from the ground up to be language agnostic which is why it ships with multiple languages out of the box which you can switch between back and forth and have multiple keyboards to swap between.
Another disadvantage of using "text" for the UI navigation is that it is not accessible to children of or people with learning disabilities whereas the iOS iPad can be used by small children.
wanna bet your teenager saved $99.99, bought a pre-paid BB s/he's not telling you about ?
what teenager would't like an el cheapo phone his/hers parent's could track ? or do you really thing your child is so trusting as to let you know every phone call/SMS/web page that got accessed ?
Wow dude. You have some serious issues. Even in that is technically possible, what sane parent would bother looking at all of that? A good parent would try to instil proper values in their child and only use the "tracking" capability if they went missing or were in trouble.
However, Android uses the Linux kernel, which is under GPL v2.
Right and if the modifications have absolutely nothing to do with the kernel or drivers then there is no obligation. If all of their modifications are to the "Android" layer sitting on top then there is no GPL V2 to worry about.
Assuming that you personally don't care about the ability to see and modify the source to the whole operating system on your phone, perhaps it would be nice to avoid this scenario: 1) You buy GPL-violating tablet from no-name company. 2) Company gets sued or threatened. 3) Company disappears and your device no longer has any support.
Get's sued by whom and where? Threatened? Most of these companies are located in China. China is notoriously lax concerning knockoffs and piracy. Good luck getting any money from that no name company. They can just reincorporate under a new name a week later and you won't get a single red cent from them.
Are you really that fucking stupid, or just really that fucking ideological?
Even if you don't like him, Obama is at worst just a problem to endure for a few years (like Ford or Carter or LBJ); he hasn't done any irreparable damage like an ideological retard such as Palin (or you, apparently) would.
What are the lottery numbers for the next draw Mr. Fortuneteller? You either know the future or you are the a kettle calling the pot black.
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No, he's not trying to impose additional conditions. The GPL doesn't allow distribution under terms that are more restrictive than the GPL is. The app store terms of use are more restrictive, so apps affected by the GPL can not be distributed through it.
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-2.0.html
See section 6. The GPL applies to the developer, not any distributor. The store selling a CD with GPL'ed programs is not bound by any more than the end user. It is not an EULA. Remi is trying to impose additional restrictions upon VLC which are not present in GPLV2. His actions are preventing end users from accessing the program. The developers who wrote the port are in no way violating the GPLV2 as long as they provide a written offer for the source code to any interested third party. Stop trying to read in languages which does not exist in V2 of the license.
We should note that his employer is Nokia which is a direct competitor to Apple in the mobile space and that Nokia has an app store as well called OVI. I would consider that a conflict of interest for Remi. Perhaps he should leave the project to avoid a conflict of interest.
If the VLC codebase is licensed under the GPLV2, could his demands, which are contrary to the wishes of the other contributors be a violation of the GPLV2 conditions? Isn't he trying to impose additional conditions not present in the GPLV2 language? INAL but this is an interesting question. Will the rest of the team have to do a fork that removes/rewrites any of his contributions to the codebase to restore GPLV2 compliance?
Sorry, but I don't follow. Rémi Denis-Courmont, an employee of Nokia, demanded the take down. He sited incompatibility with the GPL but VLC is currently licensed under GPLV2 which is compatible with the Appstore. There are serveral GPLV2 apps available on the app store with the only stipulation that it be "free". The developer is still under the obligation to distribute the source code if requested by any interested third party. The app in question was "Free" on the appstore.
Given these facts, I don't see your reasoning and I have to conclude that your post is a thinly veiled troll.
I personally don't care if you use macs or not but please stop spreading FUD.
Rémi Denis-Courmont is a Nokia employee and it is possible that someone and Nokia put him up to this. If this is the case then there could be a violation of EU competition law.
And I remember a time when OSS developers weren't shooting themselves in the foot, yelling at Apple to pull their own app because it violated the GPL to distribute it on the store, and Apple complied with that request by pulling it, and how somehow that makes them the bad guy.
For the record, the App Store is compatible with GPLv2, as long as the app is free as in beer.
So, VLC devs submit VLC to store.
Apple approves app.
One VLC dev disagrees and demands Apple remove the app due to licence violation.
Apple removes app from app store.
VLC dev cries and froths that it's "their loss" and "won't cry for users of iOS devices".
What am I missing?
Nothing other than the dev filing the complaint works for Nokia. This is anticompetitive behaviour. I would not be surprised if his boss at Nokia bribed him to do it.
Way to go Rémi Denis-Courmont. You have successfully alienated a bunch of people for your own selfish reasons. Your ego will be your own undoing. As I understanding it, VLC depends upon not just the good will of people contributing their time to code, fix bugs and/or QA for bugs but also donations from individuals.
I thought that open source was supposed to be about collaboration and sharing. These kinds of personal pissing contests do nothing to promote good will.
You could have had the opportunity to get VLC into the hands of more people which I thought was the whole point of software development regardless of your philosophy. Software without users is a waste of time and just a bunch of irrelevant mental masturbation.
Instead of choosing to be to be the bigger man and work with other people, you decided to be a prick.
I predict that the VLC project will die on the vine.
How is this flamebait? How are current Intel Macs any different from other PCs? And OS X is based on BSD.
They have a proprietary power management system which allows you to schedule power on and off, audio out ports which support both analog and digital optical do not turn on the optical output unless if you plug something into the port. Macs use EFI for everything. There are also some performance tweaks on the motherboard and that is one of the reasons why macs were a bit faster running windows than an equivalent spec PC. The other reason for the speed increase was that the video bios is emulated by the bios compatibility model so any code that access the video bios will be faster accessing the in memory bios rather than bios on the gfx card.
Finally, OS X is not based on BSD alone. It has a XNU kernel which is a hybrid of Mach microkernel code and some BSD kernel code. It also has some BSD userland, GNU userland, System V Unix and proprietary stuff written in house.
Apple has open sourced the core OS including some stuff developed in house.
Apple "innovates" again and re-invents the package manager Linux has had for ages...
See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Installer_(Mac_OS_X)
The .pkg format installer packages used by OS X originated on NeXTStep. It has been used in disk images for ages. The .app application package directory format originated on NeXTStep as well. These formats predate Java as .jar files are loosely based on the structure of .app directory packages.
You'd be amazed how many people are oblivious to design.
But in this case, I think AC is not really talking about design, but a mental cantrip where you use the far better modelling system of your brain rather than a wall covered in sticky notes that some people prefer, in order to some up with a truly holistic design.
I do the same, and find it baffling when other cannot do it.
Sticky notes on a wall? Really? I've seen people use sticky notes for planning an iteration/release with feature requests but I have not seen anyone use them for implementation design.
You can netboot macs right now in a corporate or educational environment with the right server setup.
Outselling iOS on phones? Not in the most recent quarters and if you compare OS to OS. Not by a long shot. When you combine iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad sales against Android there is no comparison.
This is already been discussed at length on androidcentral. The consensus is that this stupid rumor is false. It makes absolutely no sense to require any particular number of cores to run Android.
Who is writing this stuff and what is their motive???
You do realize that androidcentral is not an official google site but rather one run by android fanboys right? I would not consider consensus at a fanboy site to be worth much.
Given the anecdotal evidence of the poor performance of the UI in current android version from the Dalvik VM when garbage collection occurs, I am not surprised by this rumour at all.
See:
http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=11/01/04/1756245
Google needs to work on providing a HAL for graphics acceleration and fix the GC strategy of Dalvik or create a "universal binary" standard for C based development on android if it wants to compete against Windows Phone 7 let alone iOS.
So I could with an old Toshiba E800 PocketPC 7 years ago (Windows Mobile 2003 SE by the way).
It was not a PC then, it is not now.
You cannot be serious? It had that form factor of what many phones have. I could do all of those things with an iPhone too but it is the wrong form factor and screen aspect ratio.
The iPad has a resolution of 1024x768 which is the same resolution and some netbooks.
In the corporate world, it can be considered a PC, especially for executives.
With an iPad, you can give a presentation connected to a projector.
With an iPad, you can take notes in a meeting.
With an iPad, you can access a citrix farm to run windows applications.
With an iPad, you can check your calendar, make new appointments.
WIth an iPad, you can check your corporate exchange email and that same account can be used to wipe the device remotely if it is lost or stolen.
If you really prefer a physical keyboard, you can use a Bluetooth keyboard with it and it a pinch, you can use a USB keyboard with the camera adaptor kit if you don't have a bluetooth keyboard handy.
If MSFT is a "perfect example" of a company with "stagnant or declining revenues, stagnant or declining stock prices or both" when in fact its revenue growth has been at 11% throughout the last decade? For someone called aristotle-dude, you seem to be far too easily swayed by hype.
Dude, take a look at their stock price. It has been either stagnant or declining. A few cents every quarter does not make up for several dollars in decline of share price over a year.
Sorry, that should be 85 cents per share lose if you sold your DELL stock today.
I would say that buying Microsoft stock is an investment that you expect to make some return on in the form of dividends. Whether that's a sound investment is another thing entirely. It's not an absolute gamble as investing in Apple or Dell would be.
You cannot be serious. If you had invested in MSFT a year ago, you would have earned approximately 55 cents per share in dividends but you would have lost about 2.98 dollars per share in stock price.
Now if you had bought shares in AAPL a year ago, you would have made profit of 115.57 dollars per share if you had sold them today.
If you had bought DELL stock a year ago, you would lose 0.85 cents per share if you had sold it today.
Metrics and growth? Sure. Enough to account for it's current valuation? A P/E of over 20 on an established company, and no dividends? No, I don't think so. It's pure hype. Which doesn't mean there isn't room to make more money there still, but that doesn't mean it's actually worth what it's going for.
You do realize that Apple does not get any additional money from you when you buy AAPL stock from someone else on the stock market right? Now given that fact, what makes you think that you have a "right" to dividends? Did you invest in AAPL during their IP? Did you lend them money? If not, they why should some arbitrary stock speculator get money when all it does is erode the value of the company and reduce its liquidity?
Dividends are paid out by companies that are no longer on a growth cycle. They are companies that were once dominant and are now on a downward trend.
Dividends? Dividends erode the value of the company and are paid out by companies which have stagnant or declining revenues, stagnant or declining stock prices or both. MSFT is a perfect example of this. They pay dividends in an attempt to get suckers like you to buy into their stock when they fully know that the stock has nowhere do go but down.
Companies that don't pay dividends are companies that are still on the rise.
I have to respectfully disagree with you on this one. A text based UI is a terrible idea. For one, it creates a huge for internationalization if you want to maintain any sort of continuity/consistency across cultures. Then consider the whole "hub" idea. Does it even make sense to other cultures? Right now, Windows Phone 7 is limited to "english" markets and will be limited to them for some time to come because of the design decisions they made.
The iOS UI, on the other hand, is designed from the ground up to be language agnostic which is why it ships with multiple languages out of the box which you can switch between back and forth and have multiple keyboards to swap between.
Another disadvantage of using "text" for the UI navigation is that it is not accessible to children of or people with learning disabilities whereas the iOS iPad can be used by small children.
wanna bet your teenager saved $99.99, bought a pre-paid BB s/he's not telling you about ?
what teenager would't like an el cheapo phone his/hers parent's could track ? or do you really thing your child is so trusting as to let you know every phone call/SMS/web page that got accessed ?
Wow dude. You have some serious issues. Even in that is technically possible, what sane parent would bother looking at all of that? A good parent would try to instil proper values in their child and only use the "tracking" capability if they went missing or were in trouble.
However, Android uses the Linux kernel, which is under GPL v2.
Right and if the modifications have absolutely nothing to do with the kernel or drivers then there is no obligation. If all of their modifications are to the "Android" layer sitting on top then there is no GPL V2 to worry about.
By Coby? Telechips released their reference kernel earlier this month, but I've seen no indication that Coby are fulfilling their obligations.
Did Coby modify any source? Do you have any proof? Are you a lawyer?
Assuming that you personally don't care about the ability to see and modify the source to the whole operating system on your phone, perhaps it would be nice to avoid this scenario:
1) You buy GPL-violating tablet from no-name company.
2) Company gets sued or threatened.
3) Company disappears and your device no longer has any support.
Get's sued by whom and where? Threatened? Most of these companies are located in China. China is notoriously lax concerning knockoffs and piracy. Good luck getting any money from that no name company. They can just reincorporate under a new name a week later and you won't get a single red cent from them.
Are you really that fucking stupid, or just really that fucking ideological?
Even if you don't like him, Obama is at worst just a problem to endure for a few years (like Ford or Carter or LBJ); he hasn't done any irreparable damage like an ideological retard such as Palin (or you, apparently) would.
What are the lottery numbers for the next draw Mr. Fortuneteller? You either know the future or you are the a kettle calling the pot black.