The whole idea behind “open source” vs. “free software” has a long and very muddy history. Generally speaking, “open source” is a development methodology and “free software” is a political methodology. I don’t think it is correct to even use something like “vs.” between them like I did above.
I think if you are putting software into Apple’s apps stores, you have to focus on practical details. One of the things that makes non-GPL licenses attractive is just that they are so much simpler to understand for people who don’t have their own legal staff. Few companies have a legal staff like Apple, and even Apple avoids GPL. I’m not making a value judgement here. Sometimes the GPL is the right choice. But how much effort are you going to put into this app hoping that you’re right? What if the author of that library thinks that you have violated the license and contacts Apple complaining about your license violation? Is there another library you can use instead? Can you deploy the GPL code on a server where it would be more legal? Then charge people money for a subscription access to this functionality. > On Jan 29, 2016, at 3:00 PM, cocoa-dev-requ...@lists.apple.com > <mailto:cocoa-dev-requ...@lists.apple.com> wrote: > > I think that this is a slightly uncharitable view of OSS devs, but not > terribly inaccurate. John Daniel Etresoft, Inc. _______________________________________________ Cocoa-dev mailing list (Cocoa-dev@lists.apple.com) Please do not post admin requests or moderator comments to the list. Contact the moderators at cocoa-dev-admins(at)lists.apple.com Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: https://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/cocoa-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com This email sent to arch...@mail-archive.com
