On Wed, Jun 18, 2008 at 2:14 PM, John M McIntosh <
johnmci at smalltalkconsulting.com> wrote:

>
> On Jun 17, 2008, at 6:08 AM, Merik Voswinkel wrote:
>
>  As you may have noticed, John McIntosh is not releasing the source code of
>> the Cocoa iPhone VM and will only sell his future version and only if Apple
>> agrees
>>
>
> ....
>
> I think the ESUG email from Stef  (at 7:32 am PDT) has laid the above
> comment to rest.
>
> "and only if Apple agrees"
>
> The confusion here is that I legally cannot offer a fully functioning
> Squeak VM/image on the iPhone to download from the app store
> because of Apple's contract.
>
> Although people have suggest I should just ignore Apple's contract, I not
> they would appear in a court of law in California.
>
> People who know me understand I wouldn't sign, then break legal contracts
> on purpose.


I read the SDK agreement, and while I'm not a lawyer, I think the essential
question is whether the source code to an application is equivalent to the
application itself.  The agreement places various restrictions on what an
"Application" can do and defines what an Application is, but is ambiguous in
this matter.

What is clear is that Apple doesn't want people writing applications
distributed via the AppStore that enables the installation of other
applications thereby bypassing the controls they have in place with the
AppStore.

I think you would be fine publishing the source code of the squeak iphone VM
under MIT (and perhaps even compiled versions that a person in the dev
program could use to actually install a running squeak on a real iPhone).
It would then be a matter of anyone using that source code to build an
application for the iPhone to make sure they were in compliance with all the
Apple restrictions if they intended to distribute their application via the
AppStore.

Of course, it would be ideal to have a full, unrestricted squeak available
on the iPhone, but that is clearly at odds with the SDK agreement.  But I
think that's a separate point of consideration from whether you could
distrubute the source code of an iPhone VM under MIT and outside the
AppStore program.  I would view the distribution of iPhone VM sources as
equivalent to a developer sharing various frameworks to aid in the
construction of iPhone applications.  I would think Apple would encourange
and not try and restrict that sort of thing.

- Stephen
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