Is the VLC Media Player About to be Pulled from the App Store?

[Maura]

According to a report on MacRumors today, the recently released VLC Media Player for iPhone/iPad is in danger of being pulled from the App Store in the near future. MacRumors says that a formal copyright complaint has been issued against the app by one of the original contributors to the project. Apparently the compliant is based on an alleged incompatibility between the GPL license and the App Store policies. Frankly, it’s all a bit jargonish and hard to understand, but from what I can make out it has something to do with the VLC media player being licensed under the terms of the open source GNU General Public License (GPL), which the complaint says is contradicted by the products usage rules of the App Store. MacRumors says that if this is proven to be the case, then it could mean that the App Store is an incompatible way of distributing any GPLv2 licensed software. The official VideoLan site has endorsed the iPhone/iPad port of the software, however, and doesn’t support the complaint.

The upshot of all this is, for the customer, if you don’t yet have the VLC media player for iPhone/iPad, you should download it ASAP in case it gets yanked from the App Store. Click here to do exactly that.

Source: MacRumors