News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Richard Stallman on Steve Jobs: correction. Parent comment

Re:Richard Stallman on Steve Jobs: correction by _delirium on Thursday October 27, 2011 @03:44PM (#3165152)
I don't see any real reason, apart from ire for the GPL, for Apple to insist on attaching its EULA to the app (as opposed to the use of the platform, say, which is GPL-compatible), for a free-software app where the author doesn't want to add a EULA, and where the source code is freely available. The purpose of the EULA for proprietary apps is to ban various kinds of reverse-engineering/piracy, which is a pointless thing to ban if the source and app are given away and the app author doesn't care about reverse engineering.

It seems perfectly reasonable to me for a software author to say: I give this app away for free, and you can redistribute it, but you can't attach an EULA to my app if you do. If you, for some reason, are so pigheaded that you insist on adding no-reverse-engineering conditions to my app, which has no actual effect because the damn thing is open-source anyway, I'd blame you for the pointless ideological policy.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Richard Stallman on Steve Jobs: correction by sipefree on Thursday October 27, 2011 @05:03PM (#3165544)
As someone who's just had their app approved this very day, Apple don't force their EULA on you.

There's a box where you can paste in your own EULA during the upload process.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Richard Stallman on Steve Jobs: correction by _delirium on Thursday October 27, 2011 @05:40PM (#3165706)
Can you just paste the GPL in there? If so, I'm not sure why there'd be an incompatibility. Or is it not incompatible anymore?
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Richard Stallman on Steve Jobs: correction by nirvana on Monday October 31, 2011 @06:36PM (#3179459)
As I pointed out, the incompatibility is on the part of the GPL, not Apple. It is Stallman who has decreed that they are incompatible, and then turned around and blamed Apple for the incompatibility.

This makes the FSF advocates position completely asinine. Which is why I have difficulty taking any of them seriously. They don't even respect their own license, so why should I?

(Don't worry, I simply don't use GPL code, and don't release any code under the GPL.)

[ Parent | on HN ]