Hello Christopher.
We understand what you're saying and there may be technical violation.
The question however is whether such a violation has any tangible
consequences for a user or is worth pursing. In practice our
distribution of Wesnoth on ITunes gives users and developers about all
the rights to the program as they would enjoy in the normal
distribution. That individual may obtain the source code and use it as
they wish. This is a situation that is fundamentally different from
GNU Go and FSF which did not have an alternate distribution. Relevant
for our case, I believe the "no sub-contracts" clause was inserted
primarily to prevent conflicting legalities on a code's ownership and
use. Yet as Dave noted, the contract largely deals with use within the
"walled garden" and has nothing to do with ownership of code, just
distribution within their proprietary systems. Yet the usage issue is
really moot by how we offer the source code for free.
Again, if we narrowly focused on the narrow issue of the sub-contracts
clause in regards to Apple, there is likely a violation. (this has yet
to be proven in court, and Apple just wanted to avoid going to court
to challenge this issue.) But let us consider for a moment what the
outcome of undertaking the same course of action as FSF pursued. As
with GNU Go, Apple would just remove the program if we confronted them
or we'd remove the program unilaterally. In either case I doubt apple
would care very much. The outcome for us is that we'd basically lose
about 10% of our user base and a important revenue stream for
development that goes to fund some pretty important projects in art,
and game design. Less people would get to enjoy wesnoth and less
development would occur.
Its important to stress that we're not trying to circumvent GPL or
slowly chip away at our open source foundation. We made this decision
with quite a bit of forethought and care. Moreover we continue to
observe the situation with vigilance. If there was a change in the
Itunes contract language that was to the detriment of our GPL
license, we'd probably have to remove our project. However as the
situation stands, I think we've made a compromise that is to the
benefit of the project and users without any tangible repercussions.
By operating constructively and pragmatically, we're contributing to
the viability of open source projects in a way that is not easily
achieved otherwise.
Sincerely Yours
Richard
On 9-Jul-10, at 11:47 PM, christopher hopman wrote:
On Sat, Jul 10, 2010 at 1:06 AM, David White <[email protected]>
wrote:
We believed at the time that development began -- and still believe
today -- that we are acting within the GPL given the following
factors:
- The full source code is released and available.
- It is entirely permissible for anyone to compile the game from
source and distribute it using their own distribution mechanism to
people with an iPhone device. There may be some barriers to
distribution but these barriers are entirely technical due to the
"walled garden" nature of the iPhone.
Despite the fact that this complies with what I consider the most
important parts of the GPL, I think the FSF has made a good argument
about how such distribution does not comply with all parts of the GPL.
Specifically, the GPL also requires that no distribution may not
impose restriction on the rights granted by the GPL but Apple's App
store terms do precisely that.
Hypothetically, let's say that I have a compiled version of wesnoth
for windows. Now, say that I require users to agree to a license
that says that they cannot copy/modify/distribute this package.
Would you consider me to be in compliance with the GPL, simply
because they can get the same thing somewhere else that actually is
in compliance? Of course you wouldn't. What difference is there
between this hypothetical situation and the distribution in the app
store?
What I'm saying is that while Kyle's distribution on his website of
the source code is obviously GPL compliant, I do not understand how
Apple's distribution in its app store is.
-Chris Hopman
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