Apple App Store falls foul of GPL
Behind the iPhone hype, Apple's App Store introduces a frightening attack on software freedom, argues Leigh Dyer.
Now that it's finally available in Australia, everyone's talking about Apple's iPhone, and it's not hard to see why: it's a very impressive piece of hardware, with its clean lines, brilliant screen and elegant touch-based controls. Behind the shininess, though, there's a harsh reality: the iPhone is very much a proprietary device.
The most glaring immediate problem, upon getting your brand new iPhone home, is simply getting your data on to it from your Linux system.
Apple has made it very clear that iTunes is the only way to add music to an iPhone, and it seems to have no plans for a Linux version. Since the iPhone doesn't work as a USB disk, like earlier iPods do, there's no way for alternative iPod software, like gtkpod or Amarok, to add music to its database either.
The bigger issue, though, is with the App Store, the only official way to get software on to an iPhone. It's a classic "walled garden": Apple controls what goes on the Store, so you have to play by its rules, and even then, there's no guarantee that your software will make it in.
Some of those rules, particularly the licence restrictions on the iPhone Software Development Kit (SDK), are very worrying. One of these is a restriction on releasing "confidential information" about the iPhone or the SDK, which is so vague that it may include such innocuous things as discussing iPhone development on public forums. Releasing the source code to your iPhone application may well count as well, effectively putting open-source development for the iPhone in to a legal grey area.
Even if this clause doesn't apply to open-source software, the basic design of the App Store, which uses cryptographic signing to prevent the execution of unauthorised code, falls foul of version 3 of the GPL, since the user is prevented from being able to build their own version of the software, even though the source code is available.
Sure, you can get around these restrictions by jail-breaking your iPhone, but that's not the point. By buying an iPhone, regardless of your intentions, you send a message to Apple that their restrictions on software freedom are not a problem. Apple is well within its rights to do what it's doing, and the only way that the iPhone will change is if the market starts to reject it.
Other Blog Entries written by Leigh Dyer:
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