What Gian-Carlo wrote is true. We had a spectacular example a few months ago when one of VLC's developers, who just got hired by Nokia, asked Apple to pull-out VLC from the AppStore, and Apple had no choice but to comply. It annoyed everyone: all the other developers of VLC, all the users, but it happened anyway.Gian-Carlo Pascutto wrote:It is not possible to legally publish a GPL program on the App Store by anyone but the original author. This is because the App Store terms of service are not compatible with the GPL.tiger wrote: I'm talking seriously.
What if I release a legal derivative of Stockfish on the App Store and charge $5 for it?
// Christophe
This hasn't stopped many people from doing it anyway. Apple appear to be knowingly let its store be used for fraud and copyright infringement.
Why did it work? Because he noticed that according to the AppStore's agreement, you can only deploy an application on a handful of devices, which is in contradiction with the GPL that de facto forbids such limitations :
Source: http://www.techknots.com/mobiles/vlc-fo ... app-store/VLC Player for iPhone and iPad has finally been pulled off the App Store.
Stating that on their official blog, Rémi Denis-Courmont, the lead contributor of VLC project stated:
This removal thus culminates all the speculations that were happening since Oct 2010 when Rémi Denis-Courmont had announced that they have sent a copyright infringement notice to Apple since they were violating the GPL license that VLC has been licensed under, by applying DRM to it which allowed users to install the application in 5 iOS devices only.Apple removed VLC media player from its application store for iDevices. Thus the incompatibility between the GNU General Public License and the AppStore terms of use is resolved – the hard way. This end should not have come to a surprise to anyone, given the precedents.
Apple therefore were left with 2 options: Either modify their iTunes Terms and Conditions to allow GNU licensed application or to remove the application from their app store altogether. And it looks like they chose the 2nd option.
That's why Gian-Carlo is right: a GPLed program is just not compatible with the AppStore. (There are LOTS of GPLed programs in the AppStore that could be pulled out that way by one of their developers willing to annoy Apple/The other devs/the users).