Why mobile platforms need to embrace Free Software [Video]

By creating environments hostile to the GPL, Apple and other smartphone vendors could be setting back mobile computing by years

Last month, representatives of the Free Software Foundation sat down with Apple to discuss how software licensed under the Gnu GPL (General Public License) could be appropriately distributed via Apple’s iPhone App Store. The talks didn’t go well. In a nutshell, it’s no go: The App Store is completely incompatible with the GPL and Free Software. That’s bad news for developers, customers, and the mobile software market at large.

The software in question was Gnu Go, a Free Software implementation of the ancient Chinese board game. Go itself is centuries old, and as such, game play is not subject to any patents or trademarks. There’s really no reason why Gnu Go couldn’t be distributed to anyone who wanted to play — except, of course, that Apple wants complete control over how software is distributed on the …