At the end of October, Applidium released an updated VLC for iOS, finally giving iPhone and iPod Touch owners a chance to use the popular media player on their devices.
The move followed Applidium’s 1.0 version of the software which runs on the iPad.
Today, it has become clear that a possible licensing conflict may force the app offline.
PCWorld explains:
In addition to being free in the sense that it costs nothing, VLC is also open-source software developed collaboratively under the GNU Public License (GPL), which is designed to promote the creation of software that can be freely modified and redistributed by anyone, as long as they do so in compliance with the license.
In order to maintain the freedom of the software it protects, the GPL imposes several conditions under which redistribution may take place; in particular, the redistribution of the software must be unrestricted under any circumstance, allowing any user to give another user a functional copy under the same original terms.
Regular VLC contributor Rémi Denis-Courmont has said, however, that the iOS App Store violates the aforementioned terms because it uses proprietary DRM to make sure users do not redistribute apps obtained through the store. Denis-Courmont says he has now filed a copyright complaint with Apple, asking the software be removed from the store.
Apple has yet to respond but the software is still available and if you want it, chances are you should download it now.
Result for: unrest
After Nokia N-Gage gamers reported outrage after not being able to transfer purchased games from one Nokia phone to another, Nokia has confirmed that you can indeed transfer the games and it was all just a “miscommunication”.
Talking to PCWorld, Nokia added, “A miscommunication is blamed for users not being told. Internally there have been some mixed messages in this matter as well. We have been working on a way for this to work since the relaunch, but it is taking some time for everything to fall into place”.
Nokia did want however,”want to elaborate on the details for when a mechanism for transferring games will be in place, or why it hasn’t been released”.
The unrest began last week when gamers who purchased N-Gage titles were led to believe that they could not transfer the game if they got a new phone. There are about 30 N-Gage titles finally available after over 6 months of delay in the relaunch of the service.
