Wednesday, July 30, 2008

Must Redirect the Drool

The FSF makes a frustratingly compelling case for rejecting Apple's latest palmtop-that-happens-to-make-calls.

I might, just might, have been able to talk myself around these arguments, except for the quote from the iPhone license (specifically, the "Developer Program License Agreement"):

You further represent and warrant to Apple that the licensing terms governing Your Application, or governing any third party code or FOSS included in Your Application, will be consistent with and not conflict with the digital signing or content protection aspects of the Program or any of the terms, conditions or requirements of the Program or this Agreement. In particular, such licensing terms will not purport to require Apple (or its agents) to disclose or make available any of the keys, authorization codes, methods, procedures, data or other information related to the Security Solution, digital signing or digital rights management mechanisms utilized as part of the Program.


which is clearly a right-back-atcha to GPLv3; pretty disgusting.

But the (very) bright side of the FSF piece is the mention of the Neo FreeRunner from OpenMoko, which looks really promising