Hey Kassen,
I don't mean to slight Ge, I'm not against commercial software
development, closed source or not. I'm not comfortable with the way
the iphone works, but I don't have to buy one.
It is weird when GPL software gets involved though. RJ are a team of
great people, many are contributing free software enthusiasts, but
they're making software for the iphone which to me seems to be the
antithesis of free software. So as I blogged about here:
http://yaxu.org/the-iphone-and-toilet-paper-freedom/ , they're using
the GPL as a firewall. That means they can't accept patches to their
GPL code (not pd core, which is BSD licensed, but rjlib etc) unless
copyright is transfered to RJ, so they can exploit it commercially on
the iphone.
I think I read somewhere that the chuck runtime and language are part
of smule, in which case the same applies to ChucK. It seems a bit
like tivoisation by the back door. Patents come into it on a tangent
because the iphone is full of them. In the US, the android o/s has
multitouch disabled, because Apple have the US software patent on
touching your computer in more than one place at the same time.
Software patents may well come to Europe in the near future.
A free software community is a fine thing, but at least in GNU terms,
the free exchange of code, back and forth is incompatible with iphone
development.
Just in case I sound like I know what I'm talking about -- I know
little about the ChucK or pd communities, copyright or patent law. It
just so happened that this post about PTPd patents, and a comment
about smule and the GPL on my blog, arrived at the same time, and
touched a nerve. You're right though, there are separate issues I've
bodged together here. I probably shouldn't have left posting here
until the morning light...
alex
--
http://yaxu.org/
Received on Thu Jan 21 2010 - 09:07:40 GMT