Alt media player VLC cut from Apple App Store

From CNET News.com: Popular media player VLC has been pulled from Apple's App Store at the request of one of the program's original developers--in a move that's caused some hard feelings in the world of open-source software.

The situation involves a conflict between the General Public License, which governs VLC and many other open-source programs, and App Store policies.

"On January 7th, Apple removed VLC media player from its application store for iDevices," Remi Denis-Courmont, one of the developers of the desktop version of VLC, wrote in a blog post picked up by the Web site of the nonprofit group behind the original software. "Thus the incompatibility between the GNU General Public License and the App Store terms of use is resolved--the hard way. This end should not have come as a surprise to anyone, given the precedents."

Denis-Courmont himself was the one who sent Apple a notification of copyright infringement involving distribution of VLC for Apple's iOS operating system, i.e., for the iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch. The GPL lets people freely copy, distribute, and modify GPL programs provided the resulting programs are also covered by the GPL and this same provision. But digital rights management applied to programs in the App Store prevents sharing.

Denis-Courmont and others see that clash as a threat to the heart of the GPL, but Romain Goyet, co-founder of the company that created the iOS version of VLC, disagrees.

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