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Re: Octave Console Free and Octave Console Premium on iOS


From: Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso
Subject: Re: Octave Console Free and Octave Console Premium on iOS
Date: Wed, 29 Oct 2014 17:12:52 -0400

The following is not legal advice, and I am not a lawyer.

On Wed, 2014-10-29 at 21:01 +0100, Apps Embedded wrote:
> We have developped an iOS app that is based on GNU octave.

I need to know more details, but this may be OK if you are not
distributing it on the Apple store and you are not imposing any other
additional restrictions on Octave and the entirety of your app is
under the GPL.

The Apple store imposes restrictions that violate the GPL. I will work
hard to prevent Apple from violating Octave's copyleft in this way:

    https://www.fsf.org/blogs/licensing/more-about-the-app-store-gpl-enforcement

However, if you can help your users install Octave without having to
agree to any extra restrictions such as the restrictions that Apple
imposes, this may be OK.

To be clear, from what you have described so far, it does not seem
that you are doing anything wrong, but if you publish this on the
Apple store, you will be making Apple do something wrong. Apple will
most likely quickly rectify this GPL violation by removing Octave from
its store. If enough people complained, perhaps Apple could remove the
GPL-incompatible restrictions from their terms of service, but that
seems out of character for that company.

One final thing: I encourage you to charge anything you want for
distributing Octave, as long as you distribute source code for your
modifications. I think the app store model is a great way to sell free
software, as long as there are no extra restrictions.

- Jordi G. H.





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