After months of being available on the App Store, the VLC app formerly maintained by French developer Applidium has been pulled from the storefront due to the protestations of one Rmi Denis-Courmont, lead contributor to the VLC open-source multimedia player project.
Courmont started his crusade to pull the app from iTunes last October due to his complaints that Apple did not comply with the spirit and letter of the GPLv2 license that VLC is developed under.
Since the app is not able to be freely redistributed owing to iTunes restrictions on app redistribution under current App Store Terms & Conditions, it’s also considered a form of Digital Rights Management.
Courmont’s anger has actually been directed at the wrong party (Apple), since Applidium was the one responsible for submitting the port to the iTunes App Store and were also responsible for maintaining it, not the VideoLAN project as first thought.
Since Courmont could not directly pull the app himself, the complaint with was filed Apple to pull the app based on code that he contributed, making it a licensing claim.
As a parting shot: Courmont had this to say:
“At last, Apple has removed VLC media player from its application store. Thus the incompatibility between the GNU General Public License and the AppStore terms of use is resolved – the hard way. This end should not have come to a surprise to anyone, given the precedents.”
Coincidentally, Courmont is also a Nokia employee, one of Apple’s biggest competitors.
