[Bug 674960] LGPL and iOS

[GStreamer (bugzilla.gnome.org)]

https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=674960
  GStreamer | don't know | unspecified

--- Comment #4 from David Schleef <ds at schleef.org> 2012-04-27 20:13:15 UTC ---
(Please don't tell people to "consult a lawyer" when they're asking serious
questions about license compliance or ambiguities.)

The nearest analogue to the iPhone deployment case is back in the day when you
had to pay for a C compiler to compile anything for your UNIX system.  So if a
user received a program that was statically linked to an LGPL library, plus the
object files and build scripts to construct a working binary, they would still
need to pay someone in order to do that.  And clearly, that was allowed. The
reason for this is obvious: the user was not paying to modify *that program*,
rather they were paying to do any sort of compiling at all.  Same is true for
the Apple dev tools.

And along the same lines, you can jailbreak your phone and use standard open
tools to build and deploy on a jailbroken iphone, not too different from
installing the GNU system on SunOS in 1989.

Unfortunately, Apple has chosen to return us to the bad old days of static
linking and paying for compilers/dev tools.

Long term, I think the best idea is to gather together some like-minded iphone
developers and create tools that make it easy to build and deploy with LGPL
libraries, especially tools to promote license compliance.  The first "tool" to
write would be a document on how to comply with the LGPL in an iphone app.

(Leaving as notabug, since I consider this resolved.)

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