Comment by toohotatopic
6 years ago
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.