Our Freedom Costs You Bastards Money

Let’s say you hate Apple with a passion. Let’s say you are offended by the very mention of an iPod, iPhone, or iPad. You would probably froth at the mouth over the iTunes store. Blood would rush to your head and spurt out of your ears, the minute somebody mentioned the AppStore.

Now, that’s fair enough. We can’t have enough zealots rushing off to public parks and exploding in a fountain of blood, as long as they’re protecting the constitution or bunny rights or something.

This one, however, is silly.

A brief history:

(1) Apple arrogates to itself the right to control the release of software in the App Store.
(1a) It also reserves the right to brick your iWidget if you use Naughty Stuff (ie, not approved by Apple). This is quite important.
(2) Now, they’re all crap (Linux repositories spring to mind), but you can get 200,000 applications through the App Store, and there’s been about 25 billion downloads. (To simplify, I’m not talking about versions. These are distinct applications.)
(3) One 111!!!!haX0R!!111 idiot (who probably didn’t even realise that he was the spawn of the devil) put a very bad thing indeed on the App Store.

What is it, children? Does it defame Mohammed? Is a small defanged and declawed rodent inconvenienced by involuntary introduction through an aperture behind which the sun don’t shine?

No, actually, it’s much worse than that. It’s a truly innovative port of Gnu wei chi (oops, sorry, Go, although you’d have thought RMS would have called it GnuGoGirl). It’s a two-player game — the copyright, luckily for Gnu, lapsed about 2000 years ago — against an AI opponent. I’ll bet it’s crap.

Faced with this monstrous and self-inflicted offence against Licensing Laws Of The Free World (although I’ll note that Freetards don’t seem to care much about copyright. Quite the reverse), Apple had to do something.

What did these evil swine do?

Um.

They pulled the app from the App Store on May 26th, one day after the FSF did their usual headless chicken act.

This was not good enough for the laughably titled “FSF License Compliance Engineer Brett Smith,” who complained on May 27th on the basis of “section 6 of the GPLv2, which states that a redistributor of the licensed program may not impose further restrictions on the recipients to copy, distribute, or modify the program.”

Walks like a patent troll, quacks like a patent troll, sinks like a stone.

These people are beyond insane and actually beginning to irritate me, just a bit.

BUT! We have friends in strange places. Here’s Lefty, a fine human being who must be getting more and more disillusioned about the company he’s keeping. David Schlesinger is a man worth listening to.

The FSF is an open sewer of chancers and ambulance chasers.