Mac App Store

[chriscrowe]

Hey Filip--

Have you given any thought to making ShiftIt available on the Mac App Store? (for free, obviously).

I don't know if you've already got a developers license or not... But if so, maybe we can spread the word more by getting it up there. Divvy is on there and it seems to have been very successful.

[fikovnik]

I don't have it. I can in the lab, perhaps they have it. In any case the current version will likely be accepted, but the 2.0 I'm working on won't as it uses some prive Core Graphics API (moving across workspaces).

Also the major issue seems to be license incompatibility. I don't know much about this stuff, but according to this: http://adium.im/pipermail/devel_adium.im/2011-January/007973.html GPL is not a good choice for appstore. I don't know if we can freely change license to something more open like MIT?

[dnadlinger]

I'm not a lawyer either, but as long as all contributors approve a license change, you can re-issue the code under whatever license you want. Of course, you cannot retroactively change the license of already published code (so even if you went commercial, people could still legally use/modify/distribute the last version published under the GPL), but this shouldn't matter when switching to a more liberal license.

[TobiasRoeding]

As I just today noticed about this project, I would really like it, to have this project in the Mac App Store. This project is excellent and I think far more users would use it, if it would be more popular. And popularity is the one thing the Mac App Store famous for....

P.S. If you would like to provide your application in German, I could translate it....

[fikovnik]

Hi, thanks a lot for your kind words!

Regarding the app store, it would be definitely nice to have it in there - I still did not get the mac dev subscription. Unless I can somehow get it through the lab where I work someone else will have to publish it. The second problem is that the next version of ShiftIt which supports shifting a window to a different workspace might get rejected since it is implemented using a private API. In this case there will have to be two versions or some kind of extension which does not need to go through the app store I guess.

About the translation - sure that will be great! Let me just set it up and multilingual versions can take off :)

[ViViDboarder]

@klickverbot You cannot re-issue the license from GPL unless it's to a compatible license. That would defeat the purpose of the license. I'd be able to grab any GPL code and keep my work closed source and just say I changed it.

That said, @fikovnik, I know there are some GPL apps in the iOS app store and many developer just provide a link to the Source Code in a window when the Application is installed or in the settings.

[dnadlinger]

@ViViDboarder: I am not a lawyer, but… Yes, you can, if you own the rights to the code (so you can't just »grab any GPL code« and do that). You could even switch to closed source for future releases – you still couldn't forbid people to continue to use (and develop) the old version as GPL then, though.

[ViViDboarder]

@klickverbot right, but wasn't the previous version that he forked GPL? If that's the case he is not in control of the copyrights.

And, instead of the question... No, he does not own the license. The original project is GPLv3 http://code.google.com/p/shiftit/

[dnadlinger]

@ViViDboarder: Which part exactly of »but as long as all contributors approve a license change« above was unclear?

[ViViDboarder]

@klickverbot So yea, I don't think we are actually arguing since we are saying the same thing, haha. I just meant that it's not up to @fikovnik what the license is since he needs the approval of the original developer, but yes. You were correct in your original statement. I had originally missed the

but as long as all contributors approve a license change

part. Sorry!

[bittner]

Consider dual-licensing. Simply add MIT as an option to choose from. Here are some discussions, and what Richard Stallman says about dual-licensing:

• GPL/MIT dual-licensing for JavaScript
• address the issue of incompatibility with the GPL (Richard Stallman)
• Linux Insider on Dual Licensing

[fikovnik]

The licensing issue should be easily fixed I think, the problem is that to publish on App Store you need to pay for the developer subscription which I'm not going to do.

btw: ShiftIt is in homebrew.