This is Perplexing

I've gotten some interesting commentary on my last posting with regard to the LVC situation. Much of it has devolved into excruciatingly minute examinations of under exactly which circumstances one should be willing to compromise one's Steadfast Principles and precisely how much, purely in order to get more free software into more people's hands.

The perplexing part is that I don't really recall any thin-end-of-the-wedge hand-wringing over the lost-standing and only recently-resolved Sun RPC situation, where people found no day-to-day problem in a GPL violation which affected pretty much every Linux-based system on the planet for years.

I frankly don't get it. (As of a moment ago, VLC is still up on the iTune App Store...)

Gun. Foot. Bang.

Once again, the Free Software Foundation trots out its most strained and sketchiest reasoning to justify painting Apple as a villain and trying to keep GPL-licensed software out of the App Store and off iOS devices.

This time, it's taking a much bigger risk: in doing so, it's placing the VLC project into the middle of the conflict, and taking sides—apparently—with one developer against many others.

More here.