If you’re a software developer, it’s a safe bet that you’re either working on an application for a mobile device or you’ve thought about doing that. Mobile apps are big business – Gartner predicted that there would be almost 18 billion downloads of mobile apps this year alone generating some $15 billion in sales.
You’ve probably heard that you can’t release software licensed under the GPL through Apple’s App Store. That’s true; the terms of the GPL are incompatible with some of Apple’s App Store EULA terms and that incompatibility makes it impossible to distribute software through the App Store that simultaneously satisfies both licenses.
There are a lot of smart people out there who think that there’s a technical solution for every legal problem, but this one is particularly difficult. It even prevents the distribution of proprietary applications through the App Store that use libraries licensed under the LGPL or the GPL with the runtime exception. The locked-down nature of Apple’s products also eliminates the possibility of distributing a proprietary application that sideloads an (L)GPL library.
Sometimes a legal problem requires a legal solution. Some open source licensors are dual-licensing their code under compatible licenses in response to this issue, to the dismay of some free software advocates. The easiest and arguably the best solution would be to have Apple change its licensing terms to address this issue, but I don’t know if that will happen any time soon.
It’s things like this that make me glad I use Android.
Robert Blasi is a partner in Goodwin Procter’s Business Law Department. As a patent attorney, he assists technology companies with intellectual property issues, including patent strategy and portfolio development, open source software usage, intellectual property issues arising in corporate transactions and licensing. This post is not legal advice and the opinions expressed are Mr. Blasi’s and not those of his clients, Goodwin Procter, or the clients of Goodwin Procter.
Pipedream: The FSF ditch the LGPL and all its weirdness and instead advocate that people use the far simpler MPL license, much the way they advocate AL 2.0 for permissive nowadays. In one simple move they would rob the legal profession of both a massive pain and a source of income