[Bf-committers] Blender on the Mac App Store

[Mathias Panzenböck]

I might be wrong, but as I understood it the problem is that the GPL requires the distributor to 
also provide the source of the application. In the case of the App Store Apple is the distributor. 
But they have never thought that anyone would like to distribute source code through their system 
and I think they think it's not the right place for the source anyway.

I wonder why it should not be enough to provide a link to the source in the description? After all 
the binary in the App Store would be the same as on blender.org (binary compare would match), so one 
can be sure it wasn't tampered with (if you really want to test that).

But I haven't read the GPL or the App Store license. That's all just what I take from all the news 
articles about this incident.

	-panzi

On 07/21/2011 06:01 PM, jonathan d p ferguson wrote:
> hi.
>
> As far as I know, the GPL is *incompatible* with the terms of the Apple App Store. VLC was pulled because the GPL is incompatible with Apple's terms [1]. It is Apple who needs to liberalize their terms, not the FOSS developers. We must all respect the terms of the GPL, and encourage Apple to be more liberal with their terms.
>
> Given that Apple's Lion Operating System will be deployed through the App Store only, and given that Lion includes a substantial amount of GPL software, perhaps these changes are already afoot. Perhaps not.
>
> Thanks.
>
> have a day.yad
> jdpf
>
>
> [1] http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2011/01/vlc-for-ios-vanishes-2-months-after-eruption-of-gpl-dispute.ars
>
> On Jul 21, 2011, at 11:26 AM, Shaul Kedem wrote:
>
>> Hi,
>> As I understood, the VLC incident was because of the original authors
>> of VLC not wanting their software to be in the App store, apple just
>> followed the original copyright holder's request.
>>
>> As for the license, we need a lawyer for that :)
>>
>>
>>
>> On Thu, Jul 21, 2011 at 6:16 AM, Sergey I. Sharybin<g.ulairi at gmail.com>  wrote:
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> Personally, I don't think it's a good idea. App Store isn't compatible
>>> with GPL license. Even more, it was accident with VLC already -- Apple
>>> simply removed this application from App Store due to license
>>> incompatibility.
>>>
>>> Markus Kasten wrote:
>>>> Hello everyone.
>>>>
>>>> what about putting blender on the App Store (the one for Mac applications of course, not for iOS)?
>>>> Blender could reach a lot more popularity.
>>>>
>>>> Markus K.