Comment by amluto
6 years ago
IMO this is pure laziness on the part of the app store. Any store could just say “this app is licensed to you under the GPL — download source here.”
Even ignoring licensing, I think app stores could add considerable value by offering reproducible builds. Let developers upload source, verify the has (git tree hash or plain sha256sum), and rebuild in a sandbox server-side. Reject the submission unless the binary’s hash matches the developer’s.
Now stick a badge on it: “verified open-source build”. And give it a small bonus in ranking relative to other apps.
Adding that license information doesn't help the end user to run modified code. You need an apple developer license to run changes that you have made. Thus, the code is not free.
On the other hand, apple offering to compile and run any modification that users made will never happen. Then, people could start with one program and run whatever they want. The app store would collapse.
That doesn’t contradict my point. Apple could achieve two goals here:
1. Allowing GPL code in a lightweight and compliant manner at a essentially no cost to Apple.
2. Adding a class of free (or paid) open-source apps that are more trustworthy. If Apple could effectively replace a decent fraction of the free shitware apps on the App Store with better free, open-source apps, the value to end-users and hence the value of the platform would increase.
There is no requirement in the GPL that recipients of source code be able to run modified versions of the code on the target device.