Wesnoth struggles with App Store’s GPL incompatibilities

“In light of the recent GPL compliance complaint made by the
Free Software Foundation against Apple’s App Store, which sells and
distributes software for Apple gadgets, it was probably inevitable
that other problem applications would surface. While there are
various opinions on whether the App Store can legally distribute
GPL-covered binaries—along with diverging opinions on what
benefits, if any, the App Store provides to free software
projects—it is clear that some people object to their
GPL-licensed code appearing in the App Store. So it shouldn’t come
as a huge surprise that the port of the The Battle for Wesnoth for
the iPhone/iPad, which was released last November, has run into
some resistance.

“As is usual for the wesnoth-dev mailing list, the discussion
was largely polite and respectful, but there was clear
disagreement. Rusty Russell raised the issue after a friend showed
him Wesnoth running on an iPad: “That’s great, except that it came
via the Apple App Store. I didn’t think that was allowed under the
GPL?”. He pointed to the FSF’s blog post about GNU Go, and noted
that he was “uncomfortable with Apple’s restrictions on the devices
after they sell them”.

“Wesnoth lead developer David White responded that, unlike GNU
Go, Wesnoth had been ported to Apple’s devices with the explicit
endorsement of the development community.”

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