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:
1) 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.
2) 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.
3) 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