On Wednesday 14 September 2011, Graham Goode wrote:
I think my iPhone is going to be
jail broken very soon ;)
I don't have any iSomething yet, but I agree that if I get one some day, this
will be my first priority, as it "simply enables you to do more with your
device, nothing is taken away" [1]. It has been made so easy that you only
need to open a browser, navigate into jailbreakme.com and you are done. The
same for reversing: you restore a backup from iTunes and you are on jail
again. I'm not affiliated to this site, but if you want more information, it
is well explained: [1] http://www.jailbreakme.com//#moreinfo
Returning slightly to topic: the existence of Cydia and other alternative
channels is what makes the entire App Store issue irrelevant for me with
regarding to free software licenses. Let's imagine an hypothetical story.
I get an iPhone, and somehow I purchase the Wesnoth game from the App Store
paying $3.99, enjoying the experience (of playing, not paying). Some time
after, I discover some rough edges in the game that I would like to soften,
and have read that Wesnoth is released under the GPL, so I get the latest
sources from their official repository, and start hacking it. I don't like the
terms of the Apple Developer's Program, so I don't pay $99 and simply download
Xcode into my Mac. My iPhone is already jailbroken, so I can test my compiled
version on my device or any other friend (all of them have jailbroken
iThings). Finally, I can distribute my derived version as "Wesnoth Unjailed"
in Cydia, under the GPL with a write offer to provide the sources. I may
attach to it the same price tag or not, this is irrelevant. All perfectly
normal, legal and usual when working with GPL programs. No violation nowhere.
Being a customer of the Apple Store doesn't give you the right of being a
member of the Apple developer's club. But this is true as well with
Sourceforge: downloading a program from SF doesn't give you the right to
distribute a derived work there. You need to sign up with them. If you don't
want, you can still download from Sourceforge and distribute on Launchpad, or
Savannah. The channel doesn't matter, only to comply the license terms.