It was a few days back that Apple removed popular media player VLC from its App store. It was an incredible yet worrying technical license related confusion that culminated in undoubtedly a sad outcome as far as i-Pad, i-Phone, and i-Pod touch users are concerned. Here is a postmortem of the “VLC for i-pads i-pods and i-phones”.
Its here !!
October 25th 2010. Thats the day when after 2 weeks of review, VLC for the iPad was eventually was available on the AppStore. It was a much awaited release (obviously) given the capability of VLC to handle virtually any codec on the planet. But few would have thought that the app would be pulled off the App store in a short span of three months.
Beginning of the fall
Rémi Denis-Courmont, a Nokia employee and a primary VLC developer sent a mail to the VLC-devel mailing list on October 26th. The mail said that a formal notification of copyright-infringement was sent to Apple Inc. He argued that VLC being a software distributed under GNU Public License, could not feature is App Store because GPL v2 conflicts with product usage rules of the App Store. He criticized the community for releasing VLC for the App Store although the conflict between GPL and DRM (applied by Apple) was well known. This mail sparked a series of discussions in the VLC community.
Free Software Foundation(FSF) stepped in. Brett Smith, Licensing Compliance Engineer, FSF mailed to the VLC-devl list on the FSF stand on the matters and explained the conflict that existed. In principle everyone agreed to stand by GPL and think of alternate ways to make VLC available to i-Pad/Pod/Phone users. FSF blogged about GPL Enforcement in Apple’s App Store. Richard Stallman’s mail appreciating thee decision was also quoted in the discussions.
Finally, the VLC team who applied for approval for including the player in App Store, themselves stood by the copyright infringement notification sent to Apple. Fate is indeed not without its ironies.
Whats the “conflict”?
Apple uses Digital rights management (DRM) to copyright protect the apps distribute through the Store. This primarily restricts free re-distribution of software while that freedom is exactly which the GPL stands for. The GPL gives Apple permission to distribute this software through the App Store. All they would have to do is follow the license’s conditions to help keep the software free. Instead, Apple has decided that they prefer to impose Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) and proprietary legal terms on all programs in the App Store, and they’d rather kick out GPLed software than change their own rules. Their obstinance prevents you from having this great software on Apple devices—not the GPL or the people enforcing it.
The End
Apple were left with no option, but to remove VLC from App store. This was exactly what was done to another GPL licensed software GNU Go earlier. And it happened on January 7th 2011.
An Unsolvable Problem?
Neither GPL nor Apple terms seems to comply with each other in near future. So will this be an unsolvable problem? Well lets hope a work around is found to avoid these technicalities which prevent users from using a “free software” on a proprietary hardware.
