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opentrace-community / opentrace-ios

OpenTrace iOS app. Reference implementation of the BlueTrace protocol.
https://bluetrace.io
GNU General Public License v3.0
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GPL license potentially problematic for App Store distribution #2

Open wojas opened 4 years ago

wojas commented 4 years ago

I am not a lawyer, but the GPL license could potentially be problematic for App Store distribution.

An old link about the issue: https://www.fsf.org/news/2010-05-app-store-compliance

I'm not sure if anything has changed since then, but the basic issue of restricting distribution still appears to hold.

wojas commented 4 years ago

Perhaps an explicit exemption as suggested here would work: https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/8674/gpl-with-license-exception-for-ios

(Again, I am not a lawyer)

achrinza commented 4 years ago

A quick search yield more sources that concur:

While I am not a lawyer (IANAL) either, it does seem like a weird choice of license. While GPL does have good intentions, it's incredibly restrictive of its compatibility with other open source licenses.

It was good for major projects such as *NIX systems. But in an open source community where Apache 2.0 and MIT becoming more ubiquitous, it tends to add more restrictions than actual freedom to use the source code.

To quote from https://github.com/opentrace-community/opentrace-cloud-functions/issues/2:

  • Switch to a more open license (Apache 2.0 or MIT)?

    GPL 3.0 can make it difficult for certain users (or other projects) to adopt the project. This can be due to restricted IPs or policies.

    • While Apache 2.0-licensed code can be used in a GPL v3.0-licensed projects, the other way is not possible.

    • Many projects (notwithstanding Linux and alike using GPL v2.0) use Apache 2.0 or MIT

    • Apache 2.0 (or even better, MIT) is more compatible with other licenses.

    • Case in point, Twitter Bootstrap had to re-license to MIT to support Drupal's GPL license.

IMO, we shouldn't be forcing other people to comply to GPL. This may hinder adoption and cause potential users to look for a different solution. Instead, we should provide increased flexibility by using a more open license (preferably MIT as it's the least restrictive, widely used, and one of the most compatible license) and then encouraging people to contribute back to the main project.

M-Rick commented 4 years ago

How do you explain this so? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_free_and_open-source_iOS_applications There are quite a lot of softwares under the GPL license v2 and v3 in the App Store.