[sword-devel] Hi I'm new and I am interested to bring Sword to the iPhone platform

[Nathan Youngman]

Hi Greg,

I must have missed that one about GPL. Maybe Apple's agreement will  
change after the iPhone SDK comes out of beta. We'll have to wait and  
see.

Until then, any development would live in the tension between the two  
licenses... though I personally wouldn't expect the first line of code  
to be publicly available under GPL... some experimentation should be  
fine, no? Then just hoping that Apple's license changes once out of  
beta. One could check the licenses for Mac OS X development to get an  
idea. Apple themselves link to a lot of open source code.

Otherwise it sounds like the only option for now is to not use the  
Sword library (assuming it is to remain GPL). Though I assume using  
Sword modules would be fine, as the last few days I've seen mention of  
other apps that import the modules. Locked modules and distribute only  
from CrossWire modules... perhaps not.

- nj


On 7-May-08, at 12:44 PM, Greg Hellings wrote:

> Someone raised the point in an earlier thread that currently the
> iPhone SDK's license agreement does not allow any dissemination of the
> information that iPhone developers receive from apple.  Legal experts
> from GNU claim that, under its current wording (as of Beta 3), the
> iPhone Developer Agreement disallows the development of GPL-like
> software on the iPhone.  So long as the SWORD Library is only
> available under GPL and GPL-like licenses, the iPhone is not open to
> development of a native SWORD interface application (unless someone
> were to separate out the application from the library in some sort of
> remote server/client format, and license the application under an
> iPhone-compatible license).
>
> If anyone has heard that this has changed, I'd be happy to know.