[Interest] Protection against a VLC-like enforcement: a Qt developers could send an infringement complaint about software distributed through he Apple App Store, and Apple pulling the software?

[eike.ziller at nokia.com]

On 21 Feb 2012, at 20:05, ext Erwin Coumans wrote:

> I have some concerns regarding the LGPL license, statically linked in an application distributed through the Apple App Store. 
> This was previously discussed here, but it ignore the a part of the LGPL license about not imposing further restrictions:
> http://lists.qt.nokia.com/pipermail/qt-interest/2011-September/035667.html
> 
> Apple's Terms of Service impose restrictive limits on use and distribution for any software distributed through the App Store, and the GPL and LGPL doesn't allow that.
> From the LGPL license: "You may not impose any further restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights granted herein."
> See http://www.fsf.org/blogs/licensing/more-about-the-app-store-gpl-enforcement

Don't do anything without a lawyer :)

That said I'm *not* one. But GnuGo & VLC are GPL, which is much more restrictive than LGPL, so it is easier to "impose further restrictions".
The LGPL on the other hand *does* allow your application that solely *uses* the LGPL library to be distributed under different terms. For example your application's source code doesn't need to be provided. Your application also doesn't need to be freely distributable like a GPL application which, as far as I can see, was the main reason given why the GPL conflicts with Apple's terms.

The thing that will definitely make your life hard when using a LGPL library is the requirements from section 6 (from LGPLv2.1), which basically requires you to provide means for users of your application to create a version of your application that uses a different version of the LGPL library. Now, that might be a bit problematic. The user can't access or modify the application as downloaded from the app store, so even dynamically linking would not comply to this (which might not be allowed by Apple in the first place). There's 6a) & 6c) which says that you can add a "written offer" to get everything one needs to create such a version of your application "for a charge no more than the cost of performing this distribution". So you could offer people to send them the object files or static libraries they need to link your application together, maybe plus a suitable Xcode project that does that. Of course they could not just build and install that on their devices without either paying Apple for a developer subscription, or jail-braking their device. I have no idea if that would conflict with the "charge no more than the cost of performing this distribution" rule.

So, the whole thing looks like a bit of a grey area. And I've no idea if other parts of Apple's terms conflict with the LGPL either.

++ Eike

> It seems that if any Qt developer would send an infringement complaint to software distributed through he Apple App Store, Apple would pull the software, just like they did with the VLC player.
> (http://www.fsf.org/blogs/licensing/vlc-enforcement)
> 
> Do we just need to trust the Qt developers they won't do this?
> Or is there anything that protects Qt users (who want to distribute their software through the Apple App Store) from such infringement complain?
> Thanks,
> Erwin
> 
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-- 
Eike Ziller
Principal Software Engineer

Nokia, Qt Development Frameworks

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