On 11/26/2012 09:58 PM, Luis Villa wrote:
That said, in most cases, I think no special exception for app stores is necessary. There are three big issues I've seen articulated with regards to app stores, and all are either addressed or would never be addressed by copyleft.next:
- Most app stores do not want to distribute source code themselves.
This is arguably prohibited by GPL v2, but copyleft.next (following GPL 3 and MPL2) allow source to be distributed by a party other than the party that distributed the binary; i.e., in the app store case, by the party that uploaded the binary to the app store.
I also think this is the FSF's official interpretation of GPLv2, though a stricter interpretation is possible. Also, GPLv2 allows the source code offer with network-distributed object code.
So I don't think that copyleft.next has a problem with app stores along this axis.
Right.
- Most app store vendors do not want to license their patents that
might cover an app. copyleft.next (following GPL 3, MPL 1.1, and Apache 2) only requires parties to license patents when they modify an app. Since no app store that I'm aware of modifies apps (and if they did, they should obviously grant patents to those modifications), this particular problem is again not an issue for copyleft.next.
Right.
- Many (most?) app stores distribute to locked-down platforms, where
user rights are restricted by means both legal and technical. This is an important issue, and at the current time an issue that often appears in the same places as app stores, but it is a different issue, and should be resolved independently. Or to put it another way: locked-down platforms can be locked down without an app store, and app stores can deliver to non-locked-down platforms. Given this, the license should take care, while solving the lockdown problem, not to accidentally draft restrictions that would prohibit someone from using an app-store-like approach to deliver code to a rights-respecting platform. Again, I think copyleft.next handles this the right way, divorcing the anti-lockdown text (Corresponding Source, part (ii)) from discussion of the delivery mechanism (elsewhere in Sec. 9).
I don't think there is any anti-lockdown text as such. Maybe this needs to be clarified. Did I mistakenly merge a bkuhn patch? :-)
- RF